If Wishes Were Horses

A Memoir of Equine Obsession

Susanna Forrest

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2015
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857897138
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Susanna Forrest grew up in the 1980s near Norwich, and like many a girl, she yearned for a pony. She was never to get one, but this didn't stop her becoming obsessed with all things equine. If Wishes Were Horses is the story of that all-consuming interest, and of the author's nerve-wracked attempts later in life to ride once again. However, as Susanna Forrest's journey unfolds, it leads her to horse-obsessed princesses, recovering crack addicts, courtesans, warriors, pink-obsessed schoolgirls, national heroines, and runaways across the ages. From girl-riders of the Bronze Age, to lavishly adorned equestrian Victorians and 21st-century children on horseback in Brixton, she explores the development of this Pony Cult from its earliest times to the present day. In doing so, she takes to the saddle once more and rediscovers her own riding legs in this frank, eclectic, and captivating memoir of an ever-changing equine world.

Contents

List of Illustrations

The Trail

Hunters and Amazons

Back to School

Gymkhana

Ladies

Costessey

Greenacres

Horsemanship

Mary Breese

Gräfin

Jeunes Filles Bien Elevées

Saving Beauty

Diminutive Dianas

Young Riders

Lost Heroines

Housework

The Horse that Only I Could Ride

Nerve

The Red Horse and the White Mare

Tav

The Beast

Love

Ambition

Fear

Pursuit

Safety

Growing Up

The March of the Pink Hooves

Lost Boys

The Thirty-Mile-an-Hour Pony

Eponalia

Posh

Kassane

Afterword

Author’s Note

Select Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Index

List of Illustrations

The Trail: Hoof print, Berlin street art. Courtesy of the author.

Gymkhana: Susanna Forrest, 1980s. Courtesy of the author.

Greenacres: Susanna Forrest at Greenacres, c.1980. Photographer: A. Robin Forrest. Courtesy of the author.

Gräfin: ‘The Ladies’ Mile’ by Gustave Doré (1832–1883), from London, a Pilgrimage by William Blanchard Jerrold. Private Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library.

Diminutive Dianas: Susanna Forrest’s mother on Beau Brummel, 1950s. Courtesy of the author.

Housework: Story and drawing by Susanna Forrest, 1980s. Courtesy of the author.

The Red Horse and the White Mare: Cover of The Night of the Red Horse by Patricia Leitch. Courtesy of Harper Collins Publishers Limited © 1983.

Love: Tav, 1990s. Courtesy of the author.

Pursuit: ‘Sybil Harker on Saxa with the Norwich Staghounds’ by Sir Alfred Munnings (1878–1959). By courtesy of Felix Rosenstiel’s Widow & Son Ltd., London. © Sir Alfred Munnings Art Museum.

The March of the Pink Hooves: My Little Pony, Berlin street art. Courtesy of the author.

Eponalia: Horse head stencil graffiti, Berlin street art. Courtesy of the author.

The Trail: Hoof print, Berlin street art. Courtesy of the author.

The Trail

A pony is one of the most wondrous things that can happen to anyone.

The Princess Pony Book (1962)

East Berlin’s surfaces are pied with graffiti: spray-painted ‘tags’; paper cut-outs gummed in peeling layers of palimpsest; stencils of hand grenades, bananas, political slogans and dachshunds; giant murals by professional street artists that cover five-storey fire walls. Walking through the same district every day, you notice fresh ones as you might clock a new species of flower emerging from the ground, or tune into a different birdsong – a kind of urban nature trail that changes with the seasons. Because I never saw any artist at work, the images seemed to sprout from nowhere, a little bit of subconscious bubbling up to the surface like a rash or a dream.

The hooves were new.

I first saw them on Kastanienallee – Horse Chestnut Avenue. A trail of white hoof prints the width of my spread hands appeared next to the pavement and walked across the pedestrian crossing. Someone had meticulously cut out the stencils and made their way across the road, spraying one, then another, in a pattern I recognized as a walk: the two left hooves struck the ground close together, the two right hoof prints were spaced wide. One, two, three, four. An invisible pony. When it reached the kerb, it vanished.

A little while later I found a second set, which sauntered across the road at Veteranenstrasse and marched up to a mysterious ‘Equine Institute’, where a bridle hung in the window. There the invisible horse planted its front hooves squarely on the doorstep, as though peering in. A third horse walked clean across the middle of a busy junction outside a police station. Up by the Mauerpark there was a fourth set, which approached the metal railings by the road. A section of the railings had been painted in red-and-white stripes like showjumping poles, and chipboard ‘wings’ had been strapped to the sides. As a finishing touch, two evergreen plants in pots had been placed on either side and fixed to the rails with bicycle locks. The invisible pony cleared the showjump and clattered off across two lanes of traffic and a tramline into the park, where it appeared and disappeared, walking the length of an old stretch of the Wall.

After that it was as though the pony were everywhere, or he had a herd of friends trotting around Berlin at night, always just round the corner, always after I was asleep. I began to look out for the pony every day, to see what he’d been up to the night before. He’d make skittish circles outside a coffee shop, or hobble across Stargarderstrasse like a deer with all four legs roped together.

I couldn’t predict where he would appear next, so I just had to go out and walk, covering miles of Berlin’s broad, grey pavements in the pursuit of the invisible ponies. My friends reported sightings, which I mapped. One horse crossed through the dingy, red-brick cloisters of the Oberbaum bridge, which linked Friedrichshain in the east to Kreuzberg in the west, while another pranced down the red carpet before the stars at the Berlinale. A third pegged across Alexanderplatz and a fourth propped up the counter at a sausage stand, resting one hind hoof.

It was as though a herd of those elusive, magical horses from the pony books I’d read in my childhood had somehow slipped through into my grown-up, urban life. Now they flickered in and out of view, for ever on the next page, like the mysterious Water Horse in Patricia Leitch’s The Black Loch, which surges out of a dark lake at midnight, or golden Flicka, always disappearing over the hills, escaping the whirl of a lasso. The spray-painted spoor was the only clue that they had been there.

One night, on the trail of a set of hoof prints on Christinenstrasse, I passed an empty office filled with blue light. There, behind dirty windows and under a bare wire that dangled from the ceiling, was a life-size model of a black horse, who looked out into the street with ears pricked. Behind the rain-streaked glass he seemed absolutely real. I thought he might flare his nostrils and sigh, his sides rising and falling, then turn back to pace the room.

Of course, I had a horse once, a towering Arabian the colour of fire. I used to sit on the back seat of the family car and gallop him through the fields that flashed past the window. We blazed over farmland, motorway verges and moors, and one summer we crossed America from Montana to Las Vegas. He could Only Be Ridden By Me. I think we won the Grand National twice and the Derby to boot. He was all about speed; that was what I thought of when I rode him, running and running at 100 mph, with the grass flashing beneath us, before he checked himself at a ditch and rose over it like a supersonic stag.

He was beautiful from the tip of his curved ears to the last strands of his tail. He was mine, because no matter whether I was coming out worst in little-girl politics at school, or my parents had told me off, or my brother wouldn’t let me into his den in the woods, Ground a Fire was devoted to me. Sometimes he was me.

To summon him up I’d hold my hands up in front of me, wrists crooked to make front hooves. I could feel the swivelling horse ears on top of my head, and I’d paw the ground with my foot and scuff my shoes. Leaping sideways with my head down, tossing my mane when something scared me, off I’d gallop on my hind legs, right hoof down, left hoof always striking out a step in front, curling my knees, launching myself clear of the ground like the horse in Figure 3 of ‘The Canter’, flying for a split second. Then I’d whinny and my clarion call would echo round the valley (or cul-de-sac) like thunder!

He was visible only to a few. I think my mother probably knew what he looked like even without seeing the drawings I laboured over and Blu-Tacked to my bedroom walls. My brother couldn’t see him, nor could my father, but my best friend Cheryl could, and we galloped alongside each other round the school playground, dodging the boys playing football and the girls hopping over skipping ropes.

Once, on a deserted beach, I truly heard him neighing, just as Charlotte Brontë heard the Duke of Zamorna call her name in a dreary schoolroom. I had thought he had evaporated when I hit my mid-teens. He was too big to be the invisible pony; perhaps the hoof prints belonged to another woman’s imaginary horse, careering around on the loose once more.

How do you get back to Narnia? It’s easy, just a matter of finding the right wardrobe. And how will you know which one that is? Well, that’s harder. It may not be in the same room, or even in the same house, any more. I suppose it should be familiar somehow – something in the grain of the wood, the smell of it, the panelling of the doors. There might be superficial changes that could throw you off the scent, like new doorknobs, perhaps, or a different lining. The wardrobe will be fundamentally changed too because you have to allow for shrinkage. You are no longer the same size, perhaps not even the same person, as you were when you last opened the door and blundered into a new world, rather than the back of the wardrobe.

If you’re very lucky, you find yourself at the lamppost in the woods before you even realize you’ve gone through the wardrobe, and from there you only have to follow the path.

I pulled out my German dictionary and began to compose an email to a stable in suburban Berlin to arrange my first ride in eleven years.

I don’t even remember the first ride of my life, or why horses got to be so important to me. By the time I was conscious of where I ended and the saddle began, it was too late: I was imprinted like a goose when I was only a few months old. What did I fix on? A photographic reconstruction is required. It’s a creature with blunt, metal-tipped feet that could have killed me with a single blow; a head longer than my body, set with eyes the size of my fists; an enormous torso poised on legs that held me five feet clear of the ground, balanced on my wodge of terrycloth nappy on a smooth leather pad.

My mother’s hands hover near by: one behind me and one ready to clap my fat little leg to the saddle, in case the beast shifts on its feet. We’re at the bottom of my grandmother’s garden just outside Grantham, and she’s the one who takes the photograph, a Polaroid, long since lost – probably lying in the bottom of a cigar box or one of those vast, flat, 1950s chocolate boxes with flowers on the lid that filled the drawers of that house. Our friend Denise stands before her horse, holding the reins under its chin with a light grip. She doesn’t need to do much more.

Dusky seems to have an understanding of what human babies are and how gently they should be treated; she’s had a foal of her own and she stands calmly while this uncertain, wriggly and probably squealy bundle is perched on her back. She’s a ‘hunter’ – part Irish Draught and part something else: a marmalade chestnut with a hogged mane and a tail streaked with burgundy. Once a year on Boxing Day Denise takes her to hounds, and she forgets she’s meant to be a reliable matron and prances like a two-year-old on her first start at Newbury. This must have been spring, judging by my age, and she’s forgotten all about that till she next hears the sound of the huntsman’s horn.

When my mother presses me firmly to the dished seat of the saddle and they lead Dusky forward, every step that the mare takes must feel like the corner of a mountain moving. The great plates of her shoulder blades shift in front of me, her quarters rise in peaks behind, and her hooves skirr and clop on the crumbling tarmac driveway. I’m not scared, though. There’s a smile on my face.

Note the maternal conspiracy. This thing was transmitted down the distaff line, no question. Denise kept Dusky in a field at the bottom of my grandmother’s garden where my mother had kept her own horses in the 1950s and 1960s. The last of them was an old point-to-pointer called Merino, who had never mentally quit the racecourse and who expired on a grass verge a few weeks before my parents’ wedding, following an exuberant and ill-judged pursuit of a string of ponies from the local riding school. My mother was heartbroken. As they passed the spot in the white-ribboned car on the way to the church, my grandfather told her that the cheque from the knacker’s yard had arrived in the post that morning.

It was my grandmother, a saddler’s daughter, who made an heirloom out of a pony ride, hiring a rotund and insouciant brown Dartmoor from a local riding school to carry me up and down the garden on a later visit. For my first Christmas she and my grandfather bought me Dobbin, the rocking horse, with fawn-corduroy skin, brown-leather hooves and white-plastic bridle. He was stuffed with hay, which squeaked as you rode him, and had a tufted mane the texture of tough cotton wool. From the expression on my face as Grandpa legs me onto Dobbin in another photograph, you can tell that I know very well that this is the indoor version of Dusky. I’m ten months old. I can’t speak, but I know a horse when I see one.

The rest is mania. My poor mother can’t have realized what she had just unleashed, even if she’d been afflicted with the same malady as a girl. I pored over black-and-white photos of her three horses – Merino, Suzy, the New Forest pony, and the liver-chestnut hunter, Beau Brummel – and I badgered her for stories about them and about Nonny (short for Anonymous), my grandmother’s dapple grey. I was proud that my mother had once worked as a secretary for one of the big Newmarket vets and met the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe winner Vaguely Noble himself. I drilled my friends over garden showjumps made of bamboo canes and upturned flower pots, and I commandeered half the dining room to construct a stableyard made of cornflake boxes for my Sindy horses – King’s Ransom, Dallas and Arabian Knight (sic) – who subsisted on dry lentils and barley poured into miniature nosebags.

I just loved horses. Horses mattered tremendously. I was brimful of a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Epigraph page
• Contents