Tethering knots. We might not have heard of them on those dear little jaunts of our youth, said the instructor, but if we didn't learn how to do them now, sooner or later we'd find ourselves legging it back from a twenty-mile ride on which we'd lost our horses while we stopped for sandwiches.
Charles, being all keen and eager at this stage, got so enthusiastic that long after I was in bed that night he was still tying tethering knots with his shoelace round the back of a bedroom chair. Hardly able to wait to be galloping over the hills, tethering his horse to a tree when he felt like it while he stopped for a snack from his saddle bag, he was, to the astonishment of the maid who brought up the tea, up and practising them again before seven the next morning.
It was the last time our turret bedroom in that old Scottish castle saw Charles prancing happily around it at that hour of day. Holding his back and groaning, yes... Complaining because it was his turn to take the water buckets round the stables before breakfast and, according to Charles, if he made it down the turret staircase without dislocating his spine his legs would never stand the strain of the buckets anyway... but never again so light-heartedly. Two hours after untying his final practice knot with a flourish and assuring me that there was nothing to it, it was all coming back to him, Charles was up on Warrior discovering that, after an interval of twenty years, there was a great deal to it indeed. Mostly the bumping.
One never loses the rhythm of the trot, of course. Five minutes on that first morning's road run and the entire cavalcade was, out of the dim recesses of its memory, rising and sitting automatically to the instructor's ringing call of 'Hup Down, Hup Down, Hup Down, Hup Down'. Five minutes more, alas, and we were all back to bumping like sacks of turnips. What we had lost was the ability of our leg muscles to get us up and down in the peculiarly English style of riding which, for those who had never experienced it, can best be compared to crouching on a hassock, legs apart, rising and sitting inexorably to a metronome set at sixty ticks to the minute, with the prospect of getting slapped on a tight-trousered bottom with the force of a carpet beater if you come down at the wrong moment.
Charles, considering it red-faced and jolting from the back of Warrior, said we must have been mad. He'd never live to tie a tether-knot, he announced between gasps. Any moment now he was going to fall off and break his neck.
That Charles was able to talk at all was due to the fact that he was on Warrior. A big horse trots at an easier pace than a pony. I, jiggering along at his side on Pixie, who took at least two trots to keep up with Warrior's one, was going up and down like a cocktail shaker. Any time I tried to say anything, my teeth rattled.
That was a soul-searching morning, if ever there was one.
Rising to the trot till we could rise no longer. Bouncing for the next few minutes with the feeling of being slapped on the bottom by a frying pan. Roused at nightmarish intervals by the instructor's cry of 'Car coming, everybody! Don't let 'em see you lagging now. Come on – HUP Down! HUP Down! HUP Down! HUP Down!' At which we all obediently hupped like a troop of Household Cavalry and practically died in our saddles as soon as the car had passed.
It was a soul-searching afternoon, too. After lunch we dragged ourselves back on to those horses and, under the relentless eye of the instructor, practised cantering. Three people fell off and the only reason I didn't was that I was cheating. I happen to have long arms. Sitting deceptively upright, keeping ahead of everybody else so they couldn't see what I was up to, quietly I was clinging to the saddle like a leech.
I ached. I longed to die. At the beginning of every canter the saddle rose, as I grabbed at it, with a lurch that practically lifted Pixie from the ground. But I didn't fall off. As a reward for which, after we'd watered the horses that evening, and fed them and groomed them and massaged their backs to loosen their muscles (nobody, I noticed with sudden self-sympathy, was worrying about loosening mine), the instructor announced that I was one of the selected few who would be permitted to ride the eight horses who spent their nights out at grass across the river – as against the six who slept in to give us the experience of cleaning out their stables – down to their grazing ground bareback.
There was just no end to that perishing day. There being no way out short of confessing, the next thing I knew I was on Pixie's naked back jolting agonisingly down the road. Smiling brightly, of course. Studying the scenery with nonchalant interest as I went – the stables, the group of elms by the paddock gate, the colourful lichen-covered wall that bordered the track down to the river. And privately wondering whether I'd be carried back past it on a stretcher.
Charles had been selected for bareback riding, too. But Charles, apart from his stiffness, was a rider. It was coming back to him indeed. He rode his horse like a show-jumper now, down the track to the ford, across it, touched his heels to Warrior's sides, and was up the almost perpendicular bank on the other side as if he was flying. I, following behind him, was inspired by the sight of this to touch my heels to Pixie's sides too, and the next thing I knew, I was in the river. Straight over her tail I slid, but nobody was worrying about me. Just everybody, including Charles, shouting that I shouldn't have let go of her reins and racing after her in case they tripped her up.
Things even themselves out, of course. That evening – stiff but convinced that his aches were only temporary; forgetting the setbacks of the day and remembering only the ecstasy of that surge up the river bank – Charles volunteered for seven o'clock duty next morning at the stables.
'This was the life', he said enthusiastically as we went to bed. The smell of the good old straw. The feel of a good old horse between one's knees. A night's rest to get rid of his stiffness and he'd probably be up at six and go down to ride Warrior up from the river fields bareback as well.
Alas for the visions which, in one form or another, dawn perpetually on Charles's horizons. By the time he'd had a night's rest his muscles had seized up completely. He did get down to the stables – groaning and muttering at every turn of the turret steps that we were paying for this and why the hell didn't they have stable boys. And he returned at breakfast time to announce that one of the good old horses (only he didn't call them that this time) had stepped on his foot.
One of the smaller ponies, fortunately, and, having had experience with Annabel, he'd almost got his foot out in time. She'd only got him on the toe. She had shoes on, nevertheless. We discussed Charles's toe during the whole of breakfast.
It all worked out in the end, though. Monday was hell.
Tuesday – the day Pixie got colic – our bruises came out and I found the insides of my legs were black from knees to ankles and I couldn't wear nylons for a week. By Wednesday, however, we were all of us back in form. We rode on long excursions through the countryside. It was raining still, but we lit fires and ate our lunch around them and enjoyed the feeling of trotting, ruddy-faced, back to tea past weaker mortals sheltering in their cars. We rose to the trot now, too, with the ease of oiled pistons, and sang as we trotted with no thought of breathlessness, and discussed the merits of our horses as if we'd owned them for years.
Charles was particularly lyrical about Warrior. One morning we'd been riding across a moor, with nobody apparently in view for miles, when just as he leaned down to open a gate a shepherd suddenly appeared on the other side of the wall. Warrior, never having seen anybody at that particular spot in his life before, promptly bolted, and Charles, caught leaning half out of his saddle, was hard put to it for a minute or two to get control of him. Just like Cossack riding it was, the way he pulled himself up in the saddle, reined Warrior gradually to a halt and then, wheeling in his tracks, brought him trotting back to the rest of us. The instructor held this up to us as an example – how not to lose our heads and to keep tight control with hands and knees – but Charles attributed it all to Warrior. It was wonderful how that horse responded, he said. There was real understanding between him and Warrior. He wouldn't mind taking him home with us.