Talk to the Tail: Adventures in Cat Ownership and Beyond (15 page)

‘You get a good view from here, don’t you?’ I said, as we plodded down the lane.

‘Hmyerp,’ said Sharon.

Being tied to Sharon, or at least being on a horse tied to Sharon, made me feel vaguely like a toddler being taken for a walk on elastic reins. I could talk very well for a three-year-old, for sure, and it vaguely impressed her, but she couldn’t really perceive anything I said as being of adult substance, or worth a considered response. I pressed on in a similar vein, while, a few horse’s lengths ahead of us, Dee enjoyed what was becoming her own very separate ride on Bess. Sharon continued to humour me, mostly by saying ‘Hmyerp’. It was about twenty minutes later that she started whistling to herself. I recognised the tune as ‘Wanted Dead or Alive’, the big-haired, lighter-waving 1987 hit by Bon Jovi. In fact, I’d been listening to it myself just the previous day. It seemed a pleasingly appropriate song for today’s activity, with its lyrics of cowboys and steel horses, and I couldn’t stop myself asking her if she was a fan of the band.

‘Me? Ooh yeah, I love them. Seen them about eleven times now.’

This was a marked improvement. Now, we were both using full syllables with one another. ‘Me too,’ I told her. ‘I can’t think of anything I’d rather do karaoke to than “Livin’ on a Prayer”.’

In fact, I was exaggerating a little. I did enjoy listening to Bon Jovi – a good four or five of their songs, in total – and enjoyed singing along to them in the car, but there were five hundred other rock bands I’d listen to ahead of them. On the other hand, for the next hour of my life, it was more important than anything else in the world to me that Sharon liked me, and I felt the need to press home my advantage.

‘He’s my perfect man, he is,’ said Sharon.

‘Who? Jon Bon Jovi?’ I said.

‘Yeah. I like his arms. He’s just one of those men you know would hold a door open for you.’

‘And he’s got a horse, too! Even if it is a metal one. I suppose the good thing with that is that laminitis and equine flu just aren’t a problem.’

At this, Sharon began to laugh, loudly and uncontrollably. The sound was throaty, with a touch of mucus, but free and jolly, and one I could never have suspected she was capable of quarter of an hour earlier.

And then she was off: telling me about Barry, the man with the lank comb-over whom we’d met back at the cottage, who was, it turned out, her brother. How, believe it or not, he’d once had hair as big as Jon’s. How the two of them had got the coach down to Wembley to see the band play in 1987, without tickets, but had somehow managed to persuade a security guard to let them in for five pounds. About the hard times, too: their dad leaving them when they were kids and their mum passing away two years ago, leaving them having to gradually sell the fields off at the back of the house to the campsite, whose owners now wouldn’t even let them ride on the adjacent towpaths. And what did I do for a living? A writer? Really? Sharon had written some things, too. Poems, she supposed she should call them, though she hoped that they might get put to music, if Barry ever picked his guitar up again, which he should, because he was good, really good.

Earlier in the ride, Dee had periodically looked over her shoulder with a benevolent expression on her face, but now she looked back in a different manner entirely, perhaps jealous that she was missing out on all the good conversation. I’d decided I was in safe hands with Sharon, and even managed an experimental trot for a few hundred yards. As I talked to her more, something else unexpected happened: she seemed to gain teeth.

Had I climbed atop of my second horse in the weeks immediately following that, perhaps my destiny as a rider would have taken a different path. But because my rides together with Dee were spaced out over a matter of months, I didn’t build the confidence to ride off the rope. Each time, I started afresh as a beginner, and not always with a guardian as easygoing as Sharon. On holiday in Bude, in Cornwall, on a freezing cliff top, with hands too cold to feel my reins, I very nearly rode into a sheep, much to the consternation of Dee and a lady called Jill with a ponytail and no time for my nonsense. I could see the appeal of horse riding: the sense of oneness between man and beast, the entirely new view of the surrounding countryside. But it was a oneness ordained by man; I never felt convinced that the horses I rode on
wanted
to be ridden by me. Also, much as I enjoyed being able to look over a hedge and spot a pair of hares fighting, becoming eight feet tall had not really been a major ambition of mine since shortly after my ninth birthday.

My dad once told me that being a successful supply teacher was all about ‘LETTING THE KIDS KNOW IMMEDIATELY WHO’S BOSS’. I heard a similar sentiment from stable hands and riding instructors, who frequently compared their four-legged charges to stroppy adolescents. That was all very well, but I wasn’t sure I had any right in showing horses who was boss. It was quite obvious to me that they were boss, and trying to pretend anything else would be just ignoring the facts.

I loved horses’ nobility, their serenity. But it was something I felt correct appreciating from a distance, and didn’t actually feel naturally qualified to get close to – like a rhinoceros, or the young Faye Dunaway. Certainly, people
said
it was safe to feed them an apple if you kept your palm flat as you did it, but
how could they be so sure
? It actually amazed me that Man had come to be so intimate with horses at all. If Steve Irwin had been employed to make programmes not only about taunting crocodiles but about bravely poking chestnut mares with sticks, to me that would have seemed entirely logical.

Did my horse fear all arise from that one incident when I was eleven? Perhaps. I suppose there was also to be factored in the contribution of my dad, who when I was growing up had had a habit of shouting ‘WATCH OUT! YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT THEY’RE GOING TO DO!’ every time we passed a horse on a country walk. But my dad had had a habit of shouting ‘WATCH OUT! YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT THEY’RE GOING TO DO!’ every time we passed a herd of cows on a country walk too, and I hadn’t become scared of cows as a result. I might also cite a visit to the Stow-on-the-Wold Horse Fair in 2003, in which I was almost mown down by a Suffolk punch being raced by two topless adolescent gypsy boys in a buggy.

For fifty weeks of every year, Stow is the quintessential quiet Cotswolds town: a pristine place full of art galleries, perfectly arranged window boxes, delicatessens and the kind of high-end cookware shops where one might purchase a microplane cheese-grater endorsed by a celebrity chef. But in May and October, many of the galleries and shops in the town close, and the place is invaded by hundreds of gypsies from miles around, who congregate in a large field to talk, drink, hammer out cash deals on their animals – which include rabbits, dogs and donkeys, as well as horses – and catch up with old friends. It’s a little bit like the Glastonbury Festival, but if the Glastonbury Festival consisted only of the Levellers, the Levellers’ friends, and the random pets the Levellers’ friends had accrued on their travels. The one chief difference being that most people at Stow are considerably tougher than the Levellers. In fact, their babies could probably beat up the Levellers.
⁴

‘Oh, we don’t like
them
,’ a sales assistant in a bakery told me, when I went in to buy a doughnut, before heading down to the fair. ‘They come running in and steal chocolate and crisps. That’s why we have these.’ She pointed to some specially installed wooden barriers in front of the shelves.

On my way to the fair, I spotted gangs of gypsy youths parading their horses round the town, just as teenagers in my own town might show off their pimped-up Peugeots. Some of them stood round a cob, inspecting its feet, in much the same way someone buying a second-hand car might kick its tyres beforehand. A few minutes later, upon arrival, I found two Irishmen waving fists full of fifty-pound notes in the air, and intermittently slapping one another’s hands. ‘Leave the luck to meeself!’ one kept shouting at the other. ‘Leave the luck to meeself!’

I turned to the man next to me and asked what the expression meant. ‘It sort of means make your offer, then we’ll see what happens,’ he said, before introducing himself as Seamus, and telling me that he’d come all the way from the west coast of Ireland to sell fifteen budgerigars. ‘And I’m kind of trying to get rid of her as well,’ he admitted, pointing to a tiny pony about twenty yards from us, whose gums were being roughly exposed by two boys of about fifteen or sixteen, while a couple of girls, perhaps a year or two younger, in hoop earrings and tube tops, looked on, giggling in an impressed manner. ‘Do you want to buy her?’ She was the kind of size that even I couldn’t be intimidated by, but I declined, explaining that she’d still be difficult to squeeze into the back of a Ford Focus estate.

A few years earlier, two friends of my parents, Rose and Andy, made a short-lived decision to quit their jobs in education, buy a caravan and live an alternative, gypsy-inspired lifestyle. Their dream had begun and more or less ended with a weekend at Stow, where they’d had their much-cherished family Labrador stolen and been kept up through the night by a brawl outside their caravan which finally degenerated into a full-blown axe fight.

I didn’t see anything like that at Stow, but two fifteen-year-old boys with rough, outdoorsy complexions did ask me how good I was at fighting. It was a question I hadn’t given much thought to since I was thirteen, so I told them that I’d been off form since my personal trainer, Big Ronnie, had died, a couple of years ago – at which they exchanged a sneering look, then began laughing at my haircut. I might have been more offended, but I was distracted owing to the fact I’d just seen a man walk past us with a live chicken in his pocket.

I’d love to be the kind of person who could confidently walk around in public with a chicken in his pocket, but it’s never going to happen. I’d spend too much time glancing down at the chicken, to check it was okay, to give off the appropriately insouciant air that someone walking around with a chicken in his pocket needs. I think this also explains why I will probably never have what it takes to handle a horse. Obviously not everyone in the horse industry is quite as tough as the traders at the Stow Horse Fair, but I’ve noticed a certain no-nonsense attitude among horse lovers, which I know I will never possess. Many of these are people who, in 2006, Dee started to work with, after securing a job at Happy Hooves, a horse charity in Suffolk: folks who spend their working days witnessing the most horrendous equine mistreatment, yet will also look at the cold hard facts of the behaviour of one of their inmates and announce, ‘I’m sorry, but that horse is being a twat.’ These are animal lovers of the no-nonsense country kind who, when they refer to their ‘mum’s massive cock’, will do so with a straight face, not for a moment imagining that anyone in the room would think they were not talking about poultry.

I have the greatest admiration for these horse rescuers, and wish I was brave and selfless enough to do what they do, but I’m not and, in their company, I’m out of my depth. I know this first-hand from the time in 2007 that I went to dinner with eight of them. I did fairly well with the conversation for most of the night, but when the talk turned to diseased horse penises, I started to get a bit lost. However, it was a pleasure to see Dee getting so involved in her new job, and I was grateful for the opportunities it gave me to further my safely distanced appreciation of horses. I even went so far as to make my own horse-themed playlist for the mornings when I drove Dee to work. Listening to The Byrds’ ‘Chestnut Mare’, Paul Brady and Andy Irvine’s ‘Plains of Kildare’ or Forever More’s ‘Put Your Money on a Pony’, I would sometimes stop the car and watch the new Happy Hooves inmates.

I developed a particular obsession with Barney, a tiny, stunted, roly-poly pony of legendary grumpiness, whom Happy Hooves liked to dress in a promotional t-shirt on their open days. One day, watching him, having exhausted my horse playlist, I switched on the radio and found myself customising my own lyrics to the central, nagging riff of Deep Purple’s ‘Smoke on the Water’: ‘You, you, you/You are a horse/You, you, you . . .
are-a-horse
!’

Clearly, I was thinking about horses a lot, but Dee was thinking about them significantly more, and it was now several months since we’d been riding together. On our early rides, she had been proficient enough, but now her lessons had put her several light years away from me in ability. ‘Stop the car!’ she would shout as we passed a field containing a couple of bay geldings, picking up her phone and punching in Happy Hooves’ number. ‘Is that ragwort on the edge of that field? I can’t believe it! That’s going to poison them.’ Our house began to fill up with saddles, boots, riding hats, a 1970s amateur painting of a white stallion. I knew she would love it if I was to join her in her favourite pursuit, and I could see her looking on enviously at the riders I slowly – even more slowly than ever, now – drove past on Norfolk and Suffolk’s narrow country lanes.