On Cloud Nine

‘Welcome to Tesco Credit Card, this is John speaking how can I help you?’

‘The people who are cremating my horse today need paying upfront and they said my credit card payment has been declined, could you tell me if there is anything wrong with my account please?’

Thus my big, brave day continued.  To John’s credit he was quick, professional and kind, not missing a beat to deal with this unusual request.  I get the feeling the call centre training pack probably hasn’t got a section for customers with dying horses, but we found out the problem: the cremation people put in the wrong CVV number.  So it wasn’t my fault, which oddly, was a great relief.

So yesterday an era came to an end.  The death of Cloud.  I’ve got a number of stock phrases I’ve been trotting out, repeating myself to others again and again, trying to set in stone my thoughts and feelings about this situation.  Owning a horse was a childhood dream, something my mother was never going to allow.  Now I’ve done it, and I won’t do it again.  Or at any rate I have no plans to own another horse.  If there is one thing I’ve learnt from my journey through life is to never say ‘never’.  Somehow the universe tends to come back and say ‘don’t you plan things your way, you’re not in control you know’.   You have to learn to roll with it, take life as it comes and learn to live with the reality that there is no plan that has your name on it with a note beside it saying ‘must look after this one, she’s a bit special.

I had riding lessons as a girl, as lots of middle-class girls do, but there was never any intention of getting me a pony.  Oh and I wanted a pony.  What is it about horseflesh that is so addictive to young women?  Watching my lovely girls and Jo, our friend, fuss and groom Cloud yesterday, you could see the contentment that being around a horse gave them.  I’m sure others will have written long and intelligent tracts on this very area, and of course, they are the rather crude jokes about why girls enjoy riding horses, but all that is a bit puerile.  Perhaps it is elemental and deeply female to be in such close contact with another life, to feel the rhythms of another body, sense the tensions and frustrations, feel the fears and share the joys, but the truth is a good horse enjoys that contact too.  Quite why I have no idea, but when you and a horse are in one accord, there is that gestalt moment, the whole is truly greater than the sum of its parts.  But my mother did not want a pony, we didn’t have the space or money, but most importantly, she didn’t have the interest.  Just riding lessons until I grew out of the obsession.  The riding school I went to, on the top of a small hill in the mid Essex countryside, didn’t really see itself as providing conveyor belt satisfaction on a limited timescale.  If you had the passion and the ability, and it appeared I had both, then it was only fair to supply that individual with a pony so that she could take it further.  I got to the top group and the instructor would pepper his comments with ‘when you have your own pony you could…..’ and ‘John has made such great progress now he has his pony…….’  It was unfair of them, because with my adult eyes I can see they were looking to supply me with a pony, and probably livery as well, all out the reach of my family income.  Once they realised the drip, drip torture wasn’t working sneakier tactics were involved.  I got to my lesson to find my pony hadn’t been tacked up and I was left to do it, without being shown how to get a pony to take a bit without taking your fingers off.  After 20 minutes of my lesson with me fighting the increasingly bad tempered pony, the instructor would arrive, do the job in 15 seconds and tell me off.  It did seem that the riding school ponies were wily old things.  Colluding with the owners making my life more and more difficult.  Excuses for such bullying were along the lines of ‘at your level of riding you have to be able to tack up your own pony’ without actually teaching me how to do it effectively.  Of course, sitting on the pony tense and nervous made things worse, and the pony started to play up, I was berated for not dealing with it, and the riding instructor got his wish: I gave up riding lessons.  My mother cottoned on the fact that I was being exploited – no-one else was tacking up their pony for the lesson, she rounded on the riding school that she was paying for riding lessons, not for her daughter to be a groom.  Thus ended my early teenage riding lessons.  I retained a passion for horses, and was quietly envious of the girls who did get ponies, who did get to jump and hack out, but dutifully moved onto the next phase of my life.

The Absent Father has many, many faults, but in the good days he was a generous soul.  He wanted me to be happy and he knew I wanted to ride, and have a horse.  Another part of me that never grew up.  We moved to the country in 1986, just over a year after we married, and in 1987 I gave up work.  Not to have children, just to be at home.  Looking back now it was a really odd decision, giving up my independence at such a young age, giving up on myself, but part of this was I wanted to ride.  I had riding lessons at the local stables, and re-discovered my passion.   Once again I got as far as I could with riding school horses, but this time I wasn’t bullied into giving up, the owner was cannier than that.  I know now that cultivating a young women who loves horses is extremely useful, for horses are very hard work, and getting reliable help isn’t easy.  The grand and the moneyed employ grooms, but there are lots of people who own horses who can’t do that.  Thus the owner put me in touch with a women whose husband had a horse he hunted on, and the horse needed getting fit for the hunting season.  The husband worked in the City, and the woman had no interest in riding this horse.  She had daughters my age, but they weren’t around, so there was I presented with a dream, taking a horse out by myself.  I’d been attending the BHS classes at the riding school for the grooms training to be riding instructors – both stable management and riding.  I didn’t want to be a riding instructor, although looking back now, it might have been a good path for me to take.  Still, the roads we didn’t travel must remain unknown.  So there I was having a brilliant time, the only stable management I did was clean the tack once I’d ridden.  The woman made tea and we chatted as I wielded the saddle soap, I remember those days as comforting and fulfilling.  Once the season started she took me with her to Meets, taught me loads about how a hunt work, and why they should work.

I got rides with others as well, and joined the RDA (Riding for the Disabled), helping with the adult rides once a week. What with that, volunteering for Meals on Wheels, making tea for the Darby and Joan Club and looking after my own first dog, a black Labrador called Hamish, I had a busy life.  Did I notice it was something from another time?  I don’t think I did, but I was content, with my nice house by the river, a handsome husband working in the City to take care of me, and my career something best forgotten as not my sort of thing.

Life changed when I got pregnant, of course.  The stockmarket crash of 1987 didn’t help, but the fantasy bubble I was living in had to burst.  Between pregnancies I’d managed to train as a college lecturer so I had some form of my own security, but in time things got easier and the old passion to ride flared again.  The stables I had previously attended no longer had horses, just ponies, so I looked further afield and found a bigger stables about 4 miles away, with an enormous indoor arena and horses I could ride.  Not long after I started lessons it changed owners and a dynamic family arrived, with a teenage daughter who was qualified as a riding instructor.  Bossy and confident, she knew her stuff, and was soon putting me through my paces.  I had lessons on a Sunday afternoon, something the old style stables wouldn’t have done, but the family understood the needs of the market, and provided adult riding lessons.  The Absent Father had agreed to look after our girls for half a day a week, and that half day started after lunch on a Sunday, ending with him putting them to bed.  If you ask the girls now, they will tell you of dog walks when DN2 was told off for not keeping up, when she was 3 at the time, but, of course, those memories are theirs.  I remember driving over the stables for my 3 o’clock lesson, and limping back to sip cooking brandy to ease the pain if I’d fallen off again.  Sometimes it was joy, sometimes it wasn’t, but I was happy to be riding.  There were periods when I’d run out of money for lessons (something I paid for myself out of my salary) and I’d have to wait until things levelled again.  At other times I was just too tired and spent my half day off just sleeping.

I would have continued at the stables had the family not sold the business.  Every mindful of the next deal, they’d worked hard and were capitalising on their investment.  I didn’t lose contact with the daughter instructor immediately, for a while following her through several house moves and dramas, but her life and mine turned away from each other for a while and I got involved with other horse people.

My life with the Absent Father had become noticeably more comfortable over the years, and he was still generous of spirit in those days.  I was persuaded to buy a horse, heck it didn’t take much persuading, and I foolishly made all the mistakes I thought I’d avoid.  I had what I thought I wanted as a child, a pretty horse on full livery.  But it was the wrong horse for me, a mare, and an extremely costly mistake.  We moved to Shamrock and the mare moved from livery to our house, my dream complete, a horse at home.  Whether she was ill, or just bad tempered, or just not suitable for me I don’t know, but I sold her for a fraction of what I bought her for, glad to be rid of the animal that had learnt to frighten me.  The Daughter Instructor reappeared in my life, and she too had now settled, to a farmhouse about 6 miles away, with her boyfriend who wanted to learn to ride, and set about building the most stunning stable yard you could imagine.

I went back to riding lessons with her, glad to be reassured that I wasn’t awful on a horse, just I had made a silly mistake.  The boyfriend became more passionate about riding, and in particular hunting.  The horses were big and beautiful on the yard, some fine-boned, others sturdy cobs, each with their challenges, not all suitable for a novice rider.  Not that I was a novice I suppose, but this was a long way from riding school riding.  About the time I got rid of the mare, the Daughter Instructor told me that her boyfriend wanted to sell one of the horses, a 15:3 grey cob called Cloud.  I’d had lessons on Cloud, a former county show cob, now hunter,  and he was a spirited thing.  Always bucked to the right, and had a habit of seesawing from buck to rear if you tried to hold onto him.  But he worked for you, tried for you, just he wasn’t awfully bright.  Out hacking he could canter sideways up roads if he saw a plastic bag in the hedge.  And the more you tensed the more he thought there was something to be scared of.  But the power, oh the power in those hindquarters, when he pushed from the hocks the acceleration was something to behold.  It took me years to feel anything but terror when he had one of his ‘lost the plot’ gallops, but when I did, the high it gave me was something like skydiving.

I remember driving back from my lesson and stopping to phone the Absent Father from a layby, ‘They’re selling Cloud, I must have him’ was something of the command I issued.  I’m sure I phrased it in a more passive way, but to his credit, and despite losing thousands of pounds on the last horse, the Absent Father bought me Cloud, to live with the pony we had for DN2, a skewbald cob called Tom.  I can’t quite remember the story I gave him, but to me it was all so simple.  It wasn’t, of course, it was jolly hard work.  But the Absent Father bought me an Ifor Williams trailer for Christmas and jumps for my birthday.  I tried a few shows, but I wasn’t awfully good, the nerves got the better of me, and Cloud, could be silly.  I well remember someone telling me when I went to buy my first horse that I’d be better off getting a big pile of £50 notes and setting fire to them, I’d more fun in the end, and I have to say, there is a part of me that agrees with that statement.  The money needed to do horses properly is phenomenal.  I needed lots of support, for although I knew a great deal, there was part of me that was still that 12 year old being told off by the riding school instructor.

My marriage breakdown is well documented, and has been explored from many different angles.  What did Cloud add to the situation?  The Absent Father really rather liked Cloud.  Once Cloud settled in, he was equable, he loved Tom, and away from a big yard when he was bottom of the pile, he stopped being quite so silly or unreliable.  He was steady and uncomplaining, a horse you could prattle to.  We had a kennel next to his stable where the dog slept at night, and I remember looking from my bedroom window to the yard to see the Absent Father patting and chatting to Cloud.  Cloud was clearly enjoying the conversation as much as the Absent Father. 

In the years of my marriage and beyond Cloud has been a comfort to me, my girls and Jo.  Jo, now 27, came to us as 13 year old, a horse mad teenager who couldn’t own her own horse.  She came every Sunday afternoon through her school years, and became house sitter, part time groom and great friend.  We sat with cups of tea and slices of tea loaf, ski Sunday on the kitchen telly, cleaning tack and chatting.  Once she went to university, she always returned to help, sometimes competing on Cloud, sometimes taking him hunting, the thing he really loved.  He grew to about 17hh on a hunting field, was solid, reliable and fun.  I hunted 2 or 3 times, once only on Boxing Day.  Jo came on Tom to look after me, and the story of that day shall have to wait for another time, as will the tale of DN1 and her broken femur, when Cloud let himself down in style at the Lavenham and District Show.  As we chatted yesterday, grooming and fussing over Cloud, we realised he’s damaged all of us over the years, DN1 with a plate in her leg, Jo with a scar from when Cloud kicked in the head, me with damage from the infected bruises I received following a trampling and DN2, just two weeks ago, being barged over as Cloud made his way speedily into the stable on a miserable November evening.  It sounds like he was a dangerous animal, but he was far from that.  The look on his face when he’d done something to hurt you was almost comical.  Being anthropomorphic, I’d say it looked like he was saying to himself ‘oops, I’ve done it again, oh dear’  I never did quite rationalise how he could be ridiculously scared of a plastic bag in the hedgerow, yet stand quietly still whilst a vast piece of rattling farm machinery trundled past on a small country lane.

I suppose the thing that we will all miss in that stoic companionship.  Having been diagnosed with cushings disease several years ago, he has known periods of great pain and the depression that goes with it.   However, even before that when you were in turmoil, he could be relied upon to be steady beside you.  Just to hold your hand to his forehead and you could feel waves of calm being transmitted.  I know it sounds fanciful, but he was really good in a crisis.  During the marriage break up I rode a lot, determined to do things I’d been too frightened of during the last years.  I had got quite fit, and lost a lot of weight, both giving me confidence, and Cloud was there, helping me burn off the adrenalin that coursed through my body as each drama unfolded.  I learnt to gallop on Cloud, to free myself and him and let go.  I also learnt that if you trusted him and relaxed, he would stretch until you just brought him back with your voice, quietly asking him to slow, you barely even needed to change your posture, just move your weight back, and certainly no hauling on the reins was required.

So my gift to him was a peaceful end, and it was.  He was accepting, perhaps even relieved.  As that final liquid was gently pushed into his veins I stroked him on the nose and just said ‘thank you’ quietly, over and over again.  Thank you, Cloud.  Rest in peace, my darling friend.