Field Note #30 (Horse)

In addition to a Dunhill lighter, a Dunhill watch, a man bag from Mulberry and, for about five minutes, a Kermit-green Lotus, my father owns a horse. This makes him a gentleman. By that, I’m not meaning polite and well behaved, but I’m getting at ‘squire-ishness.’ He’s a country squire. I say ‘country’ because every Saturday, come rain or rain (or rain and wind and rain) he climbs into his everyday German car and blitzes to the Surrey hills. 

Of course, he must wear jodhpurs and of course, my mother must take issue with these spandexy butterscotch (buttercrotch) leggings. As he gathers up his keys and cigarettes (yes, you are allowed to smoke on a horse!), she blows a musket; she laughs harder than she’s ever laughed before, or certainly since the last time he emerged like this from the bedroom, one week ago.

And boots, too! Look at those! (Btw, just asking: what criminally expensive London shop fleeced you for those gleaming goose-steppers?) His have wedge heels; he’s not tall. And that may be part of the problem, of all the problems. But six-hands-high on Mrs. Brown, he’s a different man entirely. 

And we haven’t yet touched on the helmet which adds a few more inches of swankpottery to the whole thing.

Sometimes (always) I’m dragged along. And by ‘dragged,’ I mean tied with ropes to the tow bar and bumped at unrestricted speed down the A3. The good bit about this is that I’m not on the inside because that’s where Saturday football on the radio sounds like a frying pan of hissing boomslangs. Add to that the cigarette smoke – so thick, so deep, so putrid and pestiferous, so noisome, so olid and utterly and completely impenetrable – and, yes, I’m glad to be out here under the tires.

Usually on a Saturday, the Surrey Hills are alive with the sound of death trumpets. These are blown by a bunch of blood thirsty cream puffs in cochineal jackets who just can’t wait to witness the torture – the limb to limb vivisection – of an animal whose coat will always, and forever, be better than theirs. You can hear these horrid hornblowers from miles away and they do indeed put a damper on things. They also scare the bejeeesus out of every single beast of field and sky, which includes me and the donkey I rode in on. And also the badgers and rabbits, the moles and shrews, robins and blue tits, owls and worms and beetles. We’re all freaked out, in other words, by this death hunt.

“They pick up terror in the air,” says Old Keeble, the stable hand who leads our trek, as my steed – ears back (never good) – reverses into a thicket and readies to offload me, like a sack of Maris Pipers, down into the village below. (Can someone do something about my horse? Could somebody? Can anyone do anything?)

Old Keeble jumps off his ass and hobble-di-hoys to save me. He mutters something into my horse’s nostrils and slips her an Extra Strong Mint. Keeble’s horse sense is so honed, he might as well be a horse. He already farts like one. Mrs. Brown is farting now. She has picked up the pace, broken into a pretty aggressive trot, and every time my father’s buttocks slap the saddle, she cuts the cheese. 

And my father’s doing other tricks as well. He’s holding the reins in his teeth! That’s because he’s using his hands to find the lighter in his pockets – the Dunhill one which you’d know at once by its masculine sleekness, its so-heavy-for-its-size-no-expense-sparedness. It’s a slab, a bar, an ingot of very/extremely/most precious metal. And I know he doesn’t want to lose it. So the reins are in his teeth and his fingers are frantic at his pockets. He doesn’t yet know that the cigarette he thinks he’s about to light is two miles back in the clag.

It’s raining hard by the time we reach the cairn. This little pile of pebbles is a point of jubilation, a landmark to hope. We are turning back, heading for home. The extent of giddy joy means that the miserable sideways rain, the air’s mean nip, don’t bother me a bit. Who cares now that my sodden jeans are chafing my thighs, and the mizzle, spitting hard against my cheeks, appears to have ice in it? I don’t. I don’t care about anything except getting down this hill and back to the car.

I didn’t say, did I, that my father had horse-sense, too. And cat-sense and dog-sense, and really any-animal-in-his-company-sense. And I always wondered what it was, this knack he had. Whether it was the incongruous (Scottish) softness of his voice or the gentleness of his hands? Or the little jokes he was telling (cat ones to the dog; dog ones to the cat); the funny little whisperings which – in the company of animals – came from a truer, sweeter place. 

AB - 26.1.23