THE HORSE LISTENER
Stop the snow, I want to get off
come equipped on our holidays for a ride in the freezing cold. At least I’d bought riding boots with me, but she was wearing thin sneakers. I was losing all feeling in my fingers and toes, and Tessa was in danger of actually losing her fingers and toes all together or so it seemed. “This is awful,” I said to her. “Isn’t it?” she said. “I’m so cold.”
CANDIDA BAKER reminisces on some hot and cold horsey Christmas memories.
S
o there we were, two of my sisters and me, and my father. It was Christmas Eve morning, and we were out for a ride in Richmond Park, about an hour from the centre of London, at a stables that my Dad had ridden at a lot over the years, and where all of us had ridden with him from time to time, enjoying the occasional gallop through the ancient parklands, catching a glimpse of deer, and generally having a jolly good British time of it.
Christmases in Australia sweltering in the heat at the beach.
But this, my friends, was different. It was snowing, you see. It was a beautiful day, in a way, the sky was blue – in between snow-falls – and there was no wind, thank goodness, because it was actually freezing, and by freezing, I mean freezing.
My younger sister and I had fallen behind, while the youngest of us, Sarah, and our Dad, made their way slowly up a hill in the pine trees, the horses heads stretched down into the vile weather. Neither Tessa nor I had
But in two years, my blood had obviously decided to become Australian, and I was spending every single day frozen to the marrow, despite every attempt – including jogging every morning – to stay warm. But when my Dad had suggested he’d like to take the three of us riding, it had seemed like a lovely idea, and it was, and it would have been if it hadn’t been actually snowing on us.
When I was a little girl my uncle, who ran a riding school in Singapore, used to come and visit us in the winter, and I always found it mystifying that he found the weather so cold. He would sit shivering in front of our roaring fire, wearing about sixteen jumpers, and saying he could never live in the UK again. (Although, in fact, in the long run, he did but that’s another story.) Anyway, the point of this digression, is that I’d moved to Australia two years before, and I missed my family so much, that I’d decided to go back for a Christmas, fondly indulging in happy imaginings of the delicious hot food in the cold weather, carol singing at our local country church, the convivial gatherings, and the general feeling that Christmas was as it should be rather than my first two 32
HORSEVIBES MAGAZINE - DECEMBER 2019
She took a breath and called to our father. “George,” she shouted out into the freezing air. “If you’ll just let us stop, I’ll tell you all my secrets.” I started laughing so hard, my horse shied at the sudden sound, and as I leant forward to pat her neck, and reassure her, I actually BROKE one of her mane hairs, and it was then that I noticed that the hairs inside her ears were frozen! Even still, I think my father would have kept going if it wasn’t for the fact that snow was building up inside the horse’s shoes, and despite their best attempts to keep walking in a straight line, we were all in danger of skidding off into a kind of horse ice-skating routine at any moment. Even while we were riding though, it bought back so many memories of riding as a teenager on my pony in the snow, and watching her one day from my bedroom window while she galloped up and down in the snow, looking over her shoulder at the sprays of snow she was making with
