It seems quite normal for any person who happens to be in the vicinity, at a show for example, to feel it is their duty to come up with a different method to get your horse in the horsebox, each of which is tried in turn for a short time before the next person ‘helps’. After they have done so, the job is often still not done and the prospects of success are usually somewhat worse. I’m sure many people offer to help out of very genuine concern for your predicament. They’re hoping they can get the horse in quickly for you, but they can’t devote their whole day to it. They do their best and then have to move on. Sometimes they’ll succeed and then it’s smiles and relief all round. Once when Nicole was patiently struggling to get Sensi on the trailer in Cambridge, an old man she didn’t recognise came up and quietly offered to help. He said he was a plumber from the neighbouring building site, but he seemed to have stepped out of another world. He appeared kind and gentle, so Nicole agreed. Sensi seemed intrigued by him, and after he had stroked her neck and placed one of her forefeet on the ramp, she followed him in. ‘Never be in a hurry,’ was his advice.

On other occasions, we weren’t so lucky with outside help. I vividly remember one occasion when we were moving Sensi from a yard near Milton Keynes, to take her back to Cambridge. We had been trying for about twenty minutes, parked in the middle of the yard, attempting to bribe her with food. We coaxed her onto the ramp but couldn’t get her any further. Feeling powerless, we were already embarrassed and under pressure, because Nicole’s dad was waiting to start driving. The yard owner’s husband then appeared and said he needed us to get on with it so he could take a truck through the yard. The logical thing, of course, would have been to just move out of the way and let him through, so as not to put ourselves and Sensi under even more pressure. But having spent what felt like so much time to get her just on the ramp, we couldn’t bear to let her off. We tried to get on with it.

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.

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.

It was about 10 p.m. when I went out to the field to get Sensi and Karma and bring them in for the night. I soon knew something was wrong. Sensi was sweating and agitated, turning and nudging her flanks. I put her in the round pen and ran to get Sarah, for a second opinion. She quickly agreed with my diagnosis and went to call the vet.

Sensi had lain down in the sand of the round pen, panting. She would groan periodically and roll on her back, a glazed expression coming over her eyes. I stroked her face, trying to calm her as a sudden rush of panic gripped me. She was dying. The thought of what this would do to Nicole, whose own father had died just two weeks before, was almost unbearable. After what seemed an eternity, the vet arrived. He administered a strong painkiller and anti-spasmodic drug, but it didn’t seem to work. Sarah told me I should stand back, for although I wanted so much to help, Sensi was now having convulsions. Her legs flailed wildly, her head writhed in the sand. The vet had called the nearest equine hospital capable of doing the major surgical procedure that was the only medical action that could be taken. The operating theatre was being prepared. It seemed a big gamble, being about forty minutes’ drive away. The first thing we needed to do was to get her standing. When there was a lull in her exertions, I pulled her lead rope with insistent urgency while everyone pushed her on and, on the second effort, she made it to her feet. Sarah very kindly went and got Peter and their trailer.

It was not an ideal situation. It was very dark up by the round pen, being past midnight. There was one weak bulb at the front but other than that there was no light except the brake lights on the trailer, which was painted dark both inside and out. It could not have been much less inviting, and in addition to having Karma behind her, charging around the pen in a panic at seeing her mum being led away, Sensi was also heavily sedated. She breathed laboriously and swayed on her feet as I tried to get her moving backwards and forwards. But even a pressure halter was ineffective, due to the sedative, and Sensi remained inert. I could hardly get her moving when she was away from the trailer, and as soon as she resisted the pressure, locking her head and body against it with a stubborn determination that still glinted in her hazy, faraway eyes, I was unable to shift her no matter how hard I pulled.

I tried to load her until my arms felt like they were about to fall off. The others also tried. Having waited patiently for a considerable time, holding back from giving me advice, they must have been itching to have a go. But they soon found that nothing would shift her. She would go to the edge of the doorway but no further. We continued for over an hour, and then the vet and I suddenly were struck by the same thought. Our eyes met. ‘Why are we bothering?’ we said to each other. ‘She doesn’t have colic any more.’

Sensi had pulled it off again, in some style, keeping the four of us up half the night. She was fine. It seemed as though the struggle she had put up might have helped take her mind off the pain. Karma was even more relieved than I was, even though she was not aware that it would have meant weeks of us feeding her every few hours if Sensi hadn’t made it.

In the end I never did teach Sensi to load. Instead I watched as my working pupil, a quiet strong man from Denmark called Brian Mortensen, did it for practice. She behaved exactly as one would expect, in fact she was not very hard at all, and within twenty minutes of him starting to work with her, she was loading without a lead rope, as if she had done so all her life. Even though I had cured many worse loaders by then, I was still surprised, like so many owners I have worked for. To see my own horse, such an established bad loader, whom I had never seen walk confidently up a ramp, going up inside my horsebox as if she had never done any differently, was simply unbelievable. I had a real insight into the feelings owners must often have when I work for them. It can be very hard to let go and accept that things have changed.