I Have Been Afraid of Horses Since I Was a Boy. So Why Am I Going Back?

I have been afraid of horses since I was a boy. Not wary. Afraid.

It took about a minute to acquire and thirty years to put down, and it was not for want of trying in between.

What I Saw in a Field

We were walking through fields — a scout trip, I think, though the details have worn smooth over the years. Somebody got too close behind a horse, and it kicked them in the face.

I remember the sound of it more clearly than anything I saw.

That settled the question for the next three decades. I did make attempts on it over the years — an afternoon here, a well-meant offer there. None of them took.

They all failed in more or less the same way. Somebody puts you on a horse, tells you there is nothing to be frightened of, and expects the fear to be gone by teatime. You get through it, you get off, and the fear is sitting exactly where you left it.

The Thing My Daughter Loves

My youngest has been horse mad for as long as she has been anything.

For years she asked me to have a go. For years I found a reason not to — and having already failed at it more than once, the reasons felt well founded rather than evasive. Never a dramatic refusal, just the small reasonable-sounding sidestep that anybody can produce indefinitely.

Eventually the sidestep started to look like what it was.

Starting a Very Long Way Back

So I began, at a distance no rider would recognise as a beginning.

I stood near the horse. That was the entire first step, and it took more out of me than it ought to have. Then I put a hand on it. Then I started helping with the stables, which is unglamorous work and, as it turns out, an excellent way of being around an animal without having to do anything with it. Mucking out asks nothing of your nerve.

Then, at some point I did not notice happening, I was talking to it.

I could not tell you when that started. I only know I heard myself doing it one day and understood that something had moved. After that came leading it. Then her lessons and her competitions, holding things and being useful, which is what fathers do at the edges of their children’s obsessions.

Each step was small enough to take on its own. That is the only reason I took any of them.

The Day She Gave Me a Lesson

And then I got on.

My daughter taught me. She was fourteen. She set it up, told me what to do with my hands and my heels, and led me round the training school while I sat there rigid and followed instructions.

I was the frightened one and she was the calm one, and neither of us treated that as strange.

She was patient with me in a way I had not especially earned. No teasing, no hurrying. She read precisely how much I could take and then asked for slightly more — which is what good teaching looks like at any age.

Then she picked the pace up. Then a little more.

It was terrifying, and it is one of the better things I have done. Both of those at once, the whole way round.

Being the Beginner in Front of Your Own Child

There is something particular about being visibly bad at something in front of your own kid.

You spend their childhood as the one who knows how things work. Then you find yourself on a horse with no idea what to do with your hands, being talked through it by the person you taught to ride a bike.

I had expected that to be uncomfortable. It was not. She enjoyed it enormously and, once I could breathe again, so did I.

Why I Am Going Back

I am not cured, and I am not going to overstate it. I would still rather be led than left alone with one.

But the fear turns out to be a good deal smaller than the arrangements I built to avoid it.

My wife and I have started talking about riding properly somewhere, on one of our trips — which is a sentence I could not have said out loud two years ago.

It did not shift in the end because I finally tried. I had tried before, and trying was never the problem. It shifted because somebody was prepared to go at my pace for as long as that took — and she happened to be fourteen.