Breaking in a young horse. Advice.

For a moment I was so flummoxed I couldn’t find a word to say. I couldn’t think where to start. Finally I stammered, ‘Yes. Don’t let her do it, unless you don’t like her very much.’

By now I had seen enough messed-up young horses to know that starting one is not something that most amateurs should be getting involved with. A young Arab mare, being a combination of notoriously difficult traits, was unlikely to be easy.

If I had known what was going to happen to her, I would have been as forceful as I could in my salesmanship, which would probably have scared my prospective client off in seconds. We seemed to hit it off, but there was a major stumbling block. The daughter was quite a good rider, she said, and she wanted to take part in the training as much as possible. In itself, that didn’t seem a problem, but they lived in London. It would be very difficult for her daughter, a student called Emily, to see and participate in much of the process, unless she stayed here, which was not ideal, especially as the horse, who was called Amber, had been moved recently. I offered to visit London, even for a few days at a time, training the two of them together, but this wasn’t a great scenario either. It was a hard decision for my prospective client to make, so instead of trying to persuade her, I emphasised that I thought she should certainly get professional help, rather than letting her daughter do anything by herself, and sent her a letter outlining the various options we could offer, but heard no more.

I had all but forgotten about it when the phone rang a few months later, but I knew immediately from the tone of the lady’s voice that things had not gone well with the training. The first time a saddle had been put on, it had not been done up tightly enough, and had slipped. Amber had got loose with it upside-down around her belly and had run around the school in a complete panic. The stirrups had banged around her feet, tripping her up, and she had become entangled in them. Eventually the saddle had ended up dropping down her body, and, after falling over, she managed to squirm, buck and kick until it came off. She was now extremely phobic about the saddle. I could hear a voice in the background, anxiously adding details to a disastrous picture. Amber had become unrideable, although the trainers had tried on many occasions. She had bucked everyone off, and they now thought she was incurable and should probably be shot. As I delved deeper, the story got worse. Although the yard was right on the edge of one of London’s most scenic parks, Amber had been kept in a stable for twenty-three hours a day, as there was no pasture available, and her only time outside was half an hour in a patch of mud. Then she had been taken off to the school and trained – or tortured, as she must have seen it. We arranged for Amber to come and visit us. Emily, whose term was ending, would accompany her and stay for a few days while we assessed the situation and began work.

It was a warm day in early summer when they arrived. Nicole and Julia were off teaching on a course, which was perhaps why Jo and I were sitting outside in T-shirts, taking a break, delighted at no longer having to wear several layers and coats. A rented horsebox drew up, from which emerged a driver, and a slim girl in jeans and a huge polar coat with a fake fur hood. Her hair, long and barely controlled, was too blond and wispy for a horse to confuse it with hay, but this was about the only thing to indicate she might have anything to do with horses. Although I didn’t think she could possibly be old enough to enter one, she looked more like she belonged in a nightclub than the Pony Club. It seemed she had just emerged from a state of hibernation, one not of sleep but late nights and urban energy, which had given her white skin an extra pallor, as if hardly ever exposed to the sun. We introduced ourselves to Emily, who looked otherwise as if she wouldn’t have said a thing, then got the ramp down and let Amber out.

She had loaded and travelled reasonably well, but was obviously very tense, practically leaping down the ramp. A darker stain of sweat lay beneath her bright chestnut coat, and the tips of her ears, so inward-pointing as to look almost like crescents, darted in all directions as she took in her new surroundings, so different from those she had left. The constant hum of London’s traffic and the endless stream of jets passing overhead had given way to the gentle shushing of the leaves in the trees and the acrobatic tumbling of swallows, recently returned from Africa. An appetising smell of wild garlic emanated from the woods, a welcome change from the polluted urban atmosphere. Getting away from the city had to be good for Amber, but it was obvious that she would need more than that to come right. Although she was well halter-broken, and never pulled on the rope, or did anything outrageous, I noticed immediately that she paid no attention to anyone, ignoring us, occasionally stepping through someone’s space, quite subtly, more out of a lack of consideration than aggression, almost as if they weren’t there. She tried to do it to me, and when she found I wouldn’t let her, and pushed her back, she swished her tail in annoyance, and pulled the first of the many splendid ugly faces we were to get used to over the coming months.

As we took Amber up to the yard, Emily gave me a cheque for a thousand pounds – enough for almost two months’ stay. This was more than most of our clients had ever paid, and I had hardly ever seen a cheque as big. In an attempt to break the ice, which backfired spectacularly, Jo and I quipped, ‘Oh great, thanks, you can go home now.’ Not the slightest hint of a smile showed in her face. The couple of days she was staying suddenly seemed a very long time.

Later that day, having unpacked enormous quantities of tack, rugs, ointments, remedies, feeds and supplements, and a crooked saddle, I showed Emily and Amber around, and took them up to the round pen. I had seen join-up make a difference so quickly to so many horses, I could not help hoping that she might be about to change her whole outlook, and allow me to wipe the slate clean. I led Amber around the pen for a while, letting her see the wood and valley dotted with grazing horses, while I explained to Emily about join-up. Amber’s head was raised, and she snorted as she looked out, and began frantically to pop her lips open and shut in rapid spasms, in a grotesque impersonation of a goldfish. I had been explaining about how I would be looking for her to lick and chew, as she began to calm down and accept me. But this seemed uncontrollable, a nervous tick. She followed me well enough as I walked around, making sure not to put herself under any pressure from the rope, but steadfastly concentrating on anything else but me, and having trouble just staying in a walk. She began to empty her bowels, producing another little contribution for the muck heap about every minute for the rest of the session. I bustled about, giving her a rub, clearing up again, stroking her quietly, then leading her round, until eventually I let her loose and continued walking as if she should follow.

As soon as she realised she was loose, she ran off, as if I had made the most elementary mistake in the book, and rushed up and down the side of the pen, calling towards the field. Two horses were standing nearby, but they showed little sign of concern as Amber pranced along, desperate to find a way out. I let her keep running, and she charged around, heading vaguely towards where I was directing, yet somehow as if I wasn’t in there with her at all.

This wasn’t join-up, it was just a horse panicking. I soon started trying to invite her in, even though I had seen none of the signs I was looking for. Her lips never ceased to pop open and shut, but she held her jaws resolutely shut, eyes darting around, her head up as high as it could go. Only if I really blocked her strongly, or made a very sharp movement, could I get her to flick an ear at me for the briefest second before she made a last-minute change to her direction. She also kicked out a lot, mostly at the metal grill surrounding her, shooting off in a panic at the loud noise when she made contact. But she wasn’t aggressive, and at first I couldn’t put a finger on what she was doing. Only later did I realise that this was what she had learned as a way to cope with being trained. She was attempting to blank me out of her existence.

Eventually I managed to get her to look at me for a second, and I immediately turned away and retreated. She stopped, snorted loudly and the world seemed to stand still for a second, before she turned and ran off in the other direction. A few tries later and I got a lead rope on her, but she was so restless she couldn’t keep her feet still. Her tail swished constantly – I felt sure she was using it on me deliberately, whipping me with it as I stroked her and picked up her feet. She pawed the ground, all the while making the popping motion with her mouth, holding her breath and then flying off, round me again and again, but without ever pulling against the rope.

After a while, she settled; at least, it wasn’t getting any worse. I began walking her round the pen, trying to decide on a course of action. It seemed the saddle was a good place to start, but as soon as Jo brought one in, I wasn’t so sure. Amber swished her tail intensely, curled her nostrils and buried her ears into the back of her skull. She showed no sign of lashing out at us, but my favourite saddle wasn’t so lucky. After her first swipe at it, Jo and I looked at each other, thinking the same thing. She went to get a cheap old one, which we never use for riding, but which nevertheless has its uses.

I had by now taught Amber to back up, faces or no faces. This was my main way of telling her I was unhappy with anything she did. But I tried not to take much action unless she did something really dangerous, for she had backed away from any direct assaults on me. I wanted to see how serious she was about her hatred for saddles.

It didn’t take long to convince me she would happily rip every saddle in the world apart, given the chance. She bared her teeth and snatched a sharp bite at it, then ran around me again, trying to pretend it wasn’t there. I hadn’t failed to notice that, put in a stable, she would likewise try to tear that down, ferociously attacking the door, its frame, and even the old stone wall itself, until I eventually gave her an expendable bundle of sticks as an alternative. Strangely, she did not weave from side to side in frustration as so many overstabled horses do; she simply wanted to destroy the thing that so tormented her, and was trying to do the same to the saddle. I didn’t let her, but only because it would have set a very bad precedent, and one thing I was already sure of was that she needed a new saddle, which would not be cheap. Her viciousness didn’t help me feel kindly towards her, but I couldn’t blame her for wanting to take out her anger. When I went to move the saddle alongside her, she wheeled round me in some kind of a canter, desperate to escape.

It had been clear from the start that nobody was going to ride her that day, at the very least, so I decided not to press the matter. After all, we had several weeks to work with her. Next to the bridle and long-lines that we had rather optimistically brought up to the pen, Jo was sitting with Emily, putting a brave face on the prospects. I was glad for the encouragement even though I was beginning to realise that this was not going to be easy. Quite apart from her mental state, Amber’s young body was tense from head to toe, her muscles tightly knotted in spasms. The top line of her neck felt like a steel rod. She was fixated with one hind leg, which bore a large, pink scar on the cannon bone. She frequently looked down at it, stamped it, or kicked out, paranoid that something would injure her leg again or get entangled round it. Nicole suspected foul play at some stage as Amber’s behaviour was so similar to that of a horse which Kelly was training, who came to her after his leg had been tied up, in an unsuccessful attempt to subdue him and make him more compliant. There was no way of knowing what might have happened to Amber. But most of all, despite the major physical barriers that we would have to contend with, it was the scale of the mental barriers she had put in place, in an attempt to escape from the reality she had been subjected to, that really daunted me.

Eventually I managed to get some kind of follow-up, but it was still without any kind of acknowledgement that I existed. She went through the motions of following, as if she was just going there anyway and I happened to be in front of her, while she continued the mouth popping. I took her out of the pen, and we spent some time just letting her graze the thick, lush grass on the bank below Henry’s cedar tree, and she gulped it down eagerly, but without a trace of gratitude.

I had arranged for Pennie Hooper to come down the next day, so at least we would have a good idea of what physical problems we were dealing with. Pennie arrived, full of smiles and the usual tales of ghastly London traffic, and after her customary strong coffee and hand-rolled ciggy, we proceeded to the yard and Jo brought Amber out for us.

In her own very special way, Pennie proceeded to give us her professional opinion about Amber’s physical state. ‘Shit!’ she exclaimed, before remembering Emily was standing with us. ‘Her brachiocephalus and trapezius, what kind of a saddle have they been using? And she seems to have spent the whole time holding her breath! God, I can’t believe how tight these hamstrings are, they’re like piano wire. She’s in constant pain, all over . . .’ Pennie moved along Amber’s body, her hands studying the muscles, hard as marble beneath the skin and hair. She started to work, amidst much tail-swishing and teeth-baring, but had to back off when she got to the loin area, as Amber started to lash out.

I had known as soon as I saw her that Amber was not in good physical condition, but I had not imagined that so much damage could be done to a horse in such a short time. Amber was young and had been perfectly healthy when I’d first heard of her three months before. But she was in a much worse condition than I had expected, and I felt I had been a bit dismissive of Emily’s concerns the day before, in my efforts to keep her from becoming too despondent. I suddenly realised that a lot of her apparent coldness was down to a very sensible distrust of us, given that the last trainer had ruined her horse. It was perfectly natural for her to doubt that we would come up with a result, having made the same sorts of promises that he had spectacularly failed to make good. And it was plain that successfully training Amber to the point where she could be ridden by anyone, let alone enjoyed as a horse for Emily to hack around on, was now going to be a great deal less easy, if it would be possible at all.

‘Adam, you mustn’t do anything at all with her for at least a month, nothing the least bit strenuous. You can take her out for walks, and graze her in hand. Give her a gende massage as often as you can, but be careful. She really is close to breaking point,’ Pennie declared. Of all the horses she had looked at for us, she had never given such an extreme diagnosis.

Once she realised that we were not going to ignore her horse’s needs and proceed without regard to her physical or psychological condition, Emily seemed to relax. So for the next two days of her stay, we took Amber out to see the estate and surrounding area. It was remarkable how good she was about some things, and how others sent her into an uncontrollable panic. She showed no sign of nervousness at being separated from the other horses, and was actually very relaxed for a young horse being led out around the village with its barking dogs, noisy children and light traffic. This confirmed my initial suspicions. Although she had huge problems, these had only been the result of the training she had been subjected to. In fact, she was a perfectly normal horse, or at least she had been. Her early education had been good – she was perfect about picking her feet up, for example, and to tie up to the wall.

About a week before Emily’s visit, our new working pupil, Brian Mortensen, had arrived from Denmark. Partly due to his imperfect English, it had been difficult to break the ice with him, but I had been able to use the time-honoured tradition of asking him what his favourite band was. Expecting to have to grapple with the name of some Danish heavy rock outfit, I was surprised when he replied with the name of an English group, one of the top five biggest bands ever. Their songs are so well known that even my mother, whose rock credentials are nil, might be able to hum a few. Feeling buoyed by this success, when Brian and I gave Emily a lift that night to the pub where she was staying, I bought them a drink and tried the same thing on her. Unfortunately I had hardly heard of the pop stars she liked, so that line of conversation quickly dried up. But Emily was different in this environment, and much easier to talk to. Much like her horse, underneath a sceptical and spiky exterior lay a sensitive personality.

She was due to leave the next day, after lunch, and we were sitting outside in the sun, discussing the plan of action. We wanted to take Amber out for another walk, since it would be Emily’s last chance to spend time with her for a while. She was due to go to Los Angeles for most of the rest of her summer holiday, with her family. I was somewhat anxious about this, as I was aware that if anything happened to Amber while she was away, we would have to make all the decisions regarding veterinary treatment ourselves. In the event of a real emergency I did not want to have to make life-and-death decisions without consulting Emily and her mother. But, in spite of the fact that we seemed to be getting along much better, she was very reticent about giving me a contact number in the US. I couldn’t imagine why, as every client I had previously worked for had given me a long list of phone numbers to enable me to contact them every step of the way when they went abroad. I thought it could only be that Emily didn’t fully understand the desperate nature of the potential crises I might be calling her about, but I also didn’t want her imagination to run wild over the possibilities. She had enough to worry about with Amber even if everything went as well as could be hoped for, without hearing details about all the potential nightmare scenarios of horse ownership. So the conversation went round in circles for a bit. I realised it was time to get going on our walk, as her father would be arriving to pick her up in only about an hour. So I explained to Jo that if we weren’t back when he arrived, she should invite him in for a cup of tea and make him feel at home until we returned.

‘He won’t like that,’ said Emily quickly, and an awkward silence fell.

‘I could bring it out to the car for him,’ Jo offered quickly, obviously remembering her gaffe about the man with no legs.

‘No, it’s not that,’ Emily mumbled. ‘He won’t even get out of the car, he’ll just want to pick me up and go.’

‘Oh.’ I looked at Jo and Brian, but they seemed to find this as unusual as I did. Again it seemed like there was nothing to say, but there aren’t many situations in which I am genuinely lost for words (not that I can always be trusted to find the right ones). I mumbled that we wouldn’t force him to drink tea, but it would be rude not to offer him one, having driven all the way from London. Again Emily said he wouldn’t want to, leaving us all wondering what was wrong. Just when I thought she was never going to fill us in on the reasons behind her father’s mysterious aversion to hot drinks (and bearing in mind Nicole’s conviction that a person who does not drink tea should never be trusted), she suddenly blurted out, ‘You see, he’s, like, a celebrity, and everyone always tries to get him to do things.’

It all began to make sense. But now, although my brain was telling me that I probably didn’t want to know who he was, I was far too intrigued to let it go. ‘What does he do?’ I asked.

Emily hesitated, as if she was about to cross some sort of Rubicon. ‘He’s a musician,’ She said. ‘He plays bass for—’ It was Brian’s favourite group.

And so it was that I was able to give my working pupil a rare perk – his favourite bass player’s autograph – and also, start to realise what made Emily tick. It was obvious at once that her father’s fame, which he does not relish, had created a profound impact on her life. Her parents were exceptional by the standards of their peers in the upper echelons of rock’s nobility, in terms of the stability provided by their long marriage. But it was also clear that, in spite of the fame and fortune, Emily had not necessarily had an enviable childhood.

There was, however, one real advantage to be had from all this. She did not have the financial constraints of most of our clients, who find themselves in the difficult position of having to make choices between spending money on treatments from people like Pennie, and other vitals such as a new saddle, after which there is usually very little left to pay for training. It was clear that helping Amber was going to take a long time, if it was feasible at all; but at least a lack of funds wasn’t going to be the deciding factor.

It was one thing knowing that Emily’s family had the money to pay for our services. But it was still going to be very difficult to find ways to work effectively. Her physical condition meant that we couldn’t do the basic training that we normally would, teaching her to be saddled and then long-lined in the school and out on tracks and roads. That would have been the perfect way to gently strengthen her muscles, without the extra weight of a rider, while at the same time accustoming her to the sights and sounds of metropolitan Woodmancote. But it was absolutely out of the question to put a saddle on her, as she could go crazy and strain all her muscles again. I didn’t realise at this stage that it would prove even more difficult to train her to be long-lined, than to be ridden.

So, for the first weeks, we did nothing but lead her out, taking her to find the best views and tastiest patches of clover, and groom and massage her. She was remarkably unspooky for a young horse, calming down very quickly if a pheasant came up nearby, flushed out by the dogs, and she was fine in moderate traffic. Pennie came back and Amber was noticeably less resistant to the excruciating treatment. Maybe our training methods were making her more manageable. Or maybe she was starting to realise we weren’t trying to torture her.

Eventually Pennie gave us the go-ahead to begin working towards riding her. I took her up to the pen and tried another join-up. But, despite the considerable improvement in her physical condition, she was hardly any better mentally. As soon as she realised where we were headed, she began her goldfish impersonation, and you could almost see the adrenaline rise up in her. Immediately, she was back in survival mode, her attention everywhere but with me, her feet unable to cope with staying in a walk. It would have been unbearably frustrating for me, if I hadn’t been aware that it was at least as frustrating for her. In spite of the fact that first join-up work had not made an impression, I was still hoping to see some good results. But she still seemed to panic altogether at being sent away, however gently, and then not to want to be with me, only going through the motions of following, without seeming to have any trust or confidence in me. For the first few sessions, it was a battle to keep her attention for more than a second or two. Even when I sent her away, she would just scoot around the pen or school, lips popping frantically, looking everywhere else but at me until I showed her the back of my shoulder. Then she would come directly in, still looking away, and stand next to me, but avoid being given a stroke on the head, pushing through my space as if I wasn’t there. Every time she did it, I would go off in the other direction, and she would come round to me, like a barely-tamed barracuda.

In the next session, I tried long-lining her without tack, just using a headcollar, and found that having a line resting on her hocks was far too much for her. Her back end dropped nearly to the ground, like some great cat on springs, and then she bounded off before kicking out so ferociously that the line nearly left my hand, and flew forwards over her back as she pounded around me. No matter how carefully I did it, she could not tolerate the line going behind her. For a split-second she would catch her breath and freeze, and then she was in an unreachable state until well after I stopped. I could get her to stand still, stock still, but moving sent her into a frenzy as she fled the line on the back of her legs. She just couldn’t cope with the idea, in spite of having a rug with straps that go around each back leg in much the same fashion as the long-line. And I knew that her body wasn’t up to much more frantic running around. It just seemed so likely to end in disaster.

We were soon both in a sorry state, dripping with sweat and even more exhausted by the mental strain of it. Horses naturally react strongly to something they fear, but once they realise that no pain is involved, they’ll usually overcome their anxiety, even if it takes a while. But the memory of the huge, ugly pink scar on her back leg seemed to live on in Amber’s mind like a nightmare. She pounded that foot on the sand, her eyes rolling wildly above her mane as she glanced down at it in terror. This was not making it better, I told myself. Her mouth was almost in a spasm, and she stamped the ground and set off again, all by herself. Enough was enough. I reached out desperately, and grasped the end of her nose, as if I could somehow hold back her fear. She stood prone, holding her breath. For a moment, it was like we were the only two beings on the face of the earth. I slowly relaxed my hand, and somehow got her back down. We walked for a long time, drying off the sweat.

Everything we asked her to do that she didn’t like, she blamed us for with venom. After that day with the long-lines, she hated me for weeks. I could understand why she felt like that, but it made the prospect of making significant improvements seem remote. It even took some time to re-establish the small improvements we had started in the school. We went back to walking out around the farm, grooming and rubs.

At first it seemed as if, in her world, everything was in one of two categories: taken for granted, or utterly terrifying. Nothing much was in between. I was beginning to wonder whether there was any chance of anything in her ‘terrifying’ category ever being turned into ‘accepted’. If there was any chance of her being ridden, by Emily instead of some rodeo cowboy, she would somehow have to get used to a saddle. Before that, she would have to accept the idea of working with a human.

So I had really high hopes that we might make progress if we worked with a tarpaulin. She was bound to find it quite worrying, but as she almost certainly would never have been asked to walk over one, she wouldn’t have formed any negative associations. After I had just about accustomed her simply to being in the school, which was easier to do in body than in spirit, I set the blue tarpaulin out.

Without pausing for a moment she walked calmly over it. I could have screamed.

Unless I approached her with it aggressively, she found it only slightly disconcerting that I should want to shake it at her, more because it seemed such an odd thing for me to be doing than for any other reason. As long as I didn’t do anything with the long rope, everything was fine. Back to square one.

It was around this time my ideas on driving horses with a single line began to change. I had never been a fan of lungeing, at least in the conventional sense. The idea seems to be that the person stands in the middle and asks the horse to go round in a circle. As anyone who has ever tried acting out the horse’s role in this ritual will very soon realise, this is an extremely dull, repetitive task. Although it may exercise a horse’s muscles, it certainly does not exercise his mind. It teaches him, in fact, that you want him to do 99 per cent of the work, while you twitter on and occasionally flick a whip. And even the muscular benefits of it are questionable, especially if devices like side reins are used inappropriately. I’d tried it with Sensi many years previously, in the fields in Milton Keynes when she was still fairly green. In spite of having lots of equipment, I was spectacularly unable to control her, at one point losing hold of the lunge line completely. It was easy enough to make her move, especially with the long whip, but making her move forwards was another matter. She had an expertly tuned ability to turn in towards me, and run back if I waved the stick. And when she finally did move forwards, it was all but impossible to get her to slow down, unless she decided to turn back in towards me again. All this meant I was quite ready to accept Monty’s assertion that lungeing could be detrimental to horses, and much less useful than long-lining. But we were beginning to see how, in many situations, there could be great value in combining Monty’s ‘body language’ techniques with a lunge line, when working in a bigger space than a round pen. There are clear similarities to how a horse behaves loose, and how he behaves on a single line if you do the right things.

So I considered trying something similar with Amber. She had already been at our place for several weeks. In the usual run of things, horses came and went, usually reformed almost out of recognition in less than a month. But with her, although we had put so much effort into getting her body to unwind a bit, and she was responding to Pennie’s treatment, the improvement was painfully slow. It was not comforting to think that she had been here so long and we had hardly gained any ground.

So I got the rope out again. I decided to work mostly in the school, so she could move in a straight line more easily. When I gently asked her to move away on a 30-foot line the first time, it was just like the first join-up – she blasted off round me in a complete panic. I was expecting it, but it still shook me how manic she was, as she flew round, nearly falling over and kicking at the fence. It wasn’t long before I started to remember the fact that lungeing has a particular weakness. It’s a lot easier to get the horse to go forwards than it is to make it stop. In Amber’s case this meant that whether or not I slowed down, she was on a schedule of her own, constantly evading the central issue, my existence. I tried another way – blocking her path so she was confronted by the fence. She panicked even more. Either she leaped forwards into the closing gap, almost falling over, or halted and turned, threatening to get herself tangled in the line. Putting her on a tighter circle just made me dizzy and put even more strain on her limbs. She could turn so tight that I could reach out and touch her shoulder, and she’d still be cantering, her legs at a 45-degree angle to the ground. I even tried making her speed up, then allowing her to slow down, but that nearly sent her out over the gate. Everything was either too subtle or far too much. There just didn’t seem a way to reach her.

Finally, I tried something that I didn’t really expect to work. I shook the line between us vigorously. She raised her head sharply, which slowed her down, and she looked down the line towards me, about to panic. I stopped in my tracks and she seemed to check herself. In a second she was off again. But it was a start, and I managed to build on it, until I could really get her attention when I needed it. This turned out to be probably the most useful trick I found to use with Amber. Big waves coming up the line right towards her eye were too much for her to ignore. Her natural inclination was to pull her head back away from the movement, which slowed her down. By stopping the movement of the rope instantly, eventually I got her really sensitive. Within about two weeks, a tiny jiggle on the rope was all I needed to get her to come down to a walk. It was the first and most important thing I taught her to do, for as she slowed down, she stopped panicking and began to come back to earth mentally, from where I could get through to her in other ways. Eventually I could get her to steer around the school quite accurately. It was an obvious improvement, and a viable substitute for long-lining.

Around this time Emily came up and attended a riding clinic. Although she had never done much groundwork with a horse before, she managed to get Amber to listen to her and go away calmly wherever she directed. Using a different horse, we soon got Emily a lot more stable in the saddle, and began to unpick a few major weaknesses, which previous instructors had taught her. Knees off, feet too far forward and too much weight in the stirrup through trying to push her heels down, Emily was already halfway to falling backwards and popping upwards before a horse even moved forward, and had no idea about how to ‘bear down’ (engage her abdominal muscles, while breathing steadily). Of course, she couldn’t breathe deeply, or bear down, because she had been told to ‘sit up’, which had the effect of sticking her chest out and hollowing her back, as if she were doing ballet. Clearly, there was work to be done on Emily as well as Amber!

But Amber was a long way off being ridden. In the weeks we’d spent trying to loosen her muscles and connect with her mentally, we hadn’t even looked at putting a saddle on her. Pennie came up again and we discussed her condition. After that first terrifying experience when the saddle had slipped, the trainer had girthed her up so tightly he had almost – perhaps actually – broken her ribs. But the damage was starting to heal. When Amber welcomed Pennie’s massage and began to groom her back, showing where she wanted to be rubbed, we decided it was time to try to move on.

The first time I put a roller on her, she tried to climb out of her own skin. Her terror, her anger, was as bad as anything I have ever seen. I had taken advantage of the fact that she was blanking me out to just do it up as quickly as I could. When she realised what had happened, she threw herself around the pen, ten times worse than most horses with their first saddle. But she did not injure herself, and when she realised that the roller wasn’t slipping around her belly like her first saddle had done, calmed down eventually.

But the next day it began almost the same. Now she knew what I was up to and squirmed about, trying to bite the roller, or me if I happened to be in the way. For about two weeks, she made improvements so slowly that I couldn’t be sure they were real improvements. I was getting to the point where I dreaded training her, which was not something I had ever experienced before. Nicole took over for a while, and it was almost a relief to see that she had the same difficulties. Whether she got Amber to stand still, or put the roller on while she was cantering in that tight circle, it made no difference. Sometimes she would put the roller on and take it off twenty times in a session, other times she would put it on just once and reward Amber for her compliance by taking her out for a walk, but Amber’s attitude hardly seemed to change. After a week, Nicole handed the job over to Brian. A week later, Jo took on the task.

By now, Amber would just about tolerate the roller, albeit with much tail swishing and grinding of teeth. It was time to introduce the saddle – my old one, of course – with a breast girth. By putting it on and off, again and again, I hoped that eventually she would be calm enough to think about what I was doing, and realise that it didn’t actually hurt. We decided that it might help to limit her space.

One lovely afternoon, telling myself I really did have all the time in the world, I got her out of her field and took her up to her stable, where my tatty old synthetic saddle was waiting on the door. As I stroked her body all over, I told myself I was going to put on that saddle as many times as it took even if I set a new world record. Which I probably did. Every time she moved forward I made her move back, and if she started to trot on the spot, or paw the ground, kick, or bite, I made a sharp gesture with the rope. But the second she stopped, I instantly stopped my noisy movement, and after stroking her softly, I would go very gently back to work, lifting the girth up onto her belly and tightening and loosening it again and again.

After about one and a half hours, she was pretty good. The next day she got better. After the following session I began to work a bit in the school and found that if I was very tough, not letting her move her feet at all, she could cope with it. I wouldn’t let her trot off without having to put up with the lunge line being shaken in her face, and finally, fighting every inch of the way, she reached the stage where it wasn’t the end of the world.

At this time, we arranged for a saddle to be made for her. Kay Humphries, the only saddler we really trust, came out to take measurements. Her high standards have caused her to have numerous conflicts with manufacturers, and she’s long been campaigning against the poorly designed, poorly made, poorly fitting saddles that cause so much pain for so many horses. Emily was in the fortunate position of being able to take her old saddle, which was badly twisted and very heavy, completely out of circulation instead of needing to sell it on, to damage another horse.

We still had to face the bit where the rider gets on. By now Jo and I were a pretty good team and we got better, going through each part of the procedure enough times to be sure that Amber would cope. To get her used to the sight of a person looming up above her, Jo jumped up and down next to Amber in what would have looked to an outsider like a variation on step aerobics. She immediately seemed to know what this was all about, but apart from trotting on the spot and pulling some spectacular faces, she accepted the process comparatively calmlv. We walked around with Jo bellied over the saddle, many times, to get Amber used to the weight of a person on her back, letting her work out that the saddle no longer hurt her. In this position, Jo could easily bale out if anything went wrong. Amber tried to shoot off at first, and when I finally persuaded her to stand still, bunched herself up like a coiled spring, waiting to explode. It took several sessions before she would walk around calmly with Jo lying across her back, but when Jo finally went for it, and put her leg over, Amber was magnificent. Not only did it pass no more eventfully than it usually does with a starter, but the last thing I had most dreaded – having to tighten the girth once the rider was on – wasn’t a problem at all, probably because it had never been done before. All my worst imaginings, of Jo being thrown backwards with her foot right up in the air while I fumbled with the straps, came to nothing.

Emily tells me she loves her pony more than anything else she owns, and although it isn’t easy for her to get to Moor Wood, I’m sure Amber knows who her real owner is. I take them out for hacks around the countryside, and Emily spends hours just escorting her to the best grazing on the estate. Perhaps Amber understands something of what she’s been through it all for. Or maybe Emily just gets to be the good parent and I’m the one who does all the disciplining. For sure, Amber likes her more than me. But I’ve never had a moment of greater satisfaction in my working life than the first time I gave Emily a leg-up, and she sat on her pony and just stood quietly in the closing gloom of a December afternoon, and did nothing else but breathe in a moment that seemed to last for ever.