Saddle sore

There is something particularly insidious about horsewomen. Thin lipped, flat bottomed, bow legged, hatchet faced: I’ve never met one I liked. There is increasingly a school of thought that women who identify more with animals than human are spectrummy, so perhaps I should be more understanding, but having been at the sharp end of their haridan tongues before, I’m not inclined to be kind. I knew from the first “Bonjour” this encounter would be little different. She barely acknowledged our presence as we turned up a quarter hour early as requested, and we waited in the dying heat in the scrubby field that smelled, Jonah said, dying into his tee shirt, of poo, while she tended the horses, combing and tacking up, ignoring us. I myself don’t mind the smell of farms, having spent a good deal of holidays on a farm in North Yorkshire, but knowing his sensitivity, I let him return to the car, ensconced, as he is right now, in the last book of Harry Potter.

Half a dozen French kids showed up, and the woman busied herself sorting horses according to size. Ava, second smallest was assigned a stout piebald, and the woman hollered at Tom, torn between leaving Jonah alone in the car, and me, struggling to make myslef understood to a woman who didn’t want to listen with my school girl French, to come and lead Ava, pointing down to the beach where it seemed he would be taking her alone.

Once apportioned my stead, a chestnut nag whose Fench name I didn’t catch, I went as if to follow them, expertly rounding the horse to accompany poor Tom, who’s never led so much as a donkey in all his 41 years, and who looked frankly petrified.

Non Madame. Vous allez avec moi, she intoned.

Je voudrais vais avec ma fille, I argued, helplessly, in pigeon French and I knew at that moment that my fate was sealed. An hour plodding behind a group of six to ten year olds who had ridden a handful of times between them while she harangued at us all in A language I only understand on paper.

I began to see red. It was not so much her coarsely shouted directions, micromanaging the trail from the back of her own horse from which she led a small girl. Or the fact that, after a while of her telling me to move my horse’s tete left or right – I am as dispraxic in French as I am in English – and in any case, the horse was so old and slow and conditioned to follow devoutly the one plodding ahead that it wouldn’t have mattered if I’d let go of the reigns and laid back along its spine with my feet up, it still would have gone in the same direction as the others, I started to zone out and look at the scenery, pleasant enough as it was. It was more, as we plodded through the lapping waves of the beach, that I hadn’t come to exercise someone’s pony. I’d come, and paid money for, a once in a lifetime’s experience, and this wasn’t it.

Je ne comprend pas, I lied as she continued to witter on to me about the cheval’s head, and as she got more animated, I shouted, back, no longer a child, J’ai mon propre cheval, to make her understand that I needed her instruction as much as I needed a tin opener in that minute, and I was getting a bit fed up with being shouted at. Not fed up. Rage seethed off me as a portal to ten years of piecemeal lessons with vinegar-mouthed Mrs Ackworth opened up, of being told to shorten my reigns, straighten my back, squeeze with my knees and mind the horse’s mouth, flooded back. I never did have my own horse, although my mother’s neighbours had one in a field that I would ride as a young teen, bareback after dark, dangerously, without a helmet when no one was looking; and my best friend, Emily Renton, whose family owned a pig farm, who at 17 had two, which we would ride eating chocolate down shady lanes, discussing boys and sex and A-levels before racing and losing control of reigns we held one handed, rodeo style, collapsing in giggles and cigarette smoke.

I had wanted to canter along the sands, barefoot, and there was no way this trollop was going to break into as much as a trot. By the time we returned, shoulders beginning to ache from too long out of the sadle, Tom was stood  waiting, waving expectantly with an ecstatic Ava, and Jonah who’d been roused from his book to see the line of ponies come in, hoping, against all odds, that I’d enjoyed myself. I shouted, petulantly, c’etait enneyeuse, loud enough for the horse witch to hear, before sliding down, hooking the reigns on the saddle and stalking off to the car like the teenager I once was.

So annoyed was I that I barely delight in Ava’s experience by proxy, who’d been trotting up and down on the sands with just Tom’s ignorant instruction. I had wanted to share it with her, and all I’d had was a reprisal of my own bridled childhood. I bristled through an unnecessary trip to the supermarche, and sulked my way through pizza, still reeking of horse hair, allowing myself to get feasted on by mosquitoes, angry for acting up.  Jonah, trying to calm me, told me to put my shoulders down. But I minded this observation much less from him than from the horsewomen of my youth. I don’t take instruction well. But it’s clearly genetic, as neither, most of the time, does he.