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| Photograph: Credit: Huw Davies |
When you've been working with horses for over 10 years, you know that some of the them will have crossed over the Rainbow Bridge over the years since you met them and it's always terribly sad. However, you don't expect your clients to go the same way. Almost at the beginning of being an RA I met a woman called Linda who was beautiful inside and out, who asked me if I could tame her two New Forest foals which she'd recently bought off the Forest. She'd had another trainer out who had quite frankly botched it, and ended up with one pony upside down in a ditch and the other running across the fields with yards of electric tape and fence posts in tow. She wasn't really sure if she wanted to trust anyone else.
We talked about her facilities and as she had no stables, we sectioned off her garage, and took down any low shelves. Fern and Freddie were herded in and in a fairly short time they were allowing touch and then their head collars to be put on. This was the start of a good relationship with the ponies which culminated in Fern coming to me for starting a few years later. As a collector of waifs and strays, Linda also asked me to head collar train a Dartmoor Hill Pony called Willow that she took in a few years later. By then however, she knew that she had cancer. True to form she had made arrangements for the welfare of the ponies, and they recently travelled down to another kind, and trusted trainer on Dartmoor where they will be safe.
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| Linda and Willow |
Her funeral today was so poignant. Stairway to Heaven at the beginning and Galloping Home (the theme to Black Beauty) at the end, made sure that everyone was in tears as if the fact that she only 56 wasn't enough.
