Back in the late 1950s, Deirdre and her friend Sarah, both just nineteen, came to America. The pair had left Britain, where post-war ration books were still in use. Sarah was to train horses and riders for Jamie Kreuz at Bryn Mawr Farms outside Philadelphia. Deirdre was to work for the Insurance Company of North America in Philadelphia and help Sarah on weekends. What follows is Part V of their adventures, which have included Part I: “How to Bridle a Green Field Hunter,” Part II: “The Witch With Warts,” Part III: “Pink Gin: The Beer Swilling Timber Horse,” and Part IV: “Purrfec’ Granary.”
Illustration by Rosemary H. Coates
Two weeks after Sarah and I arrived in the States we were on the road northwards with twenty-five hunters. They were entered at the Piping Rock Horse Show on Long Island. The horses were loaded into nine-horse trailers for their journey. In the first compartment six horses faced each other across an aisle. Although three horses could be loaded into a separate compartment at the back, there was only one 11.2-hand pony in there—so small, he was up to his belly in straw. This was Sex Spot who would not travel with another horse; he had the three back stalls to himself. He got his name because he had a football-sized black spot on his rump, in an otherwise white coat.
“He be a bad traveler,” explained Billy who mucked out for us. “He be from the gutter—bad news he be when traveling.”
Sex Spot was moved around the show grounds in the back of his owner’s Oldsmobile, where he behaved perfectly. The first time Sarah and I met him, formally, was as he stepped out of this car. He had just won the Small Pony Working Hunter Class and was insufferably smug. It was only when asked to get into a down-to-earth, nine-horse trailer that the fun began. He would cause such a hullabaloo about loading that to avoid any further shilly-shallying, we’d carry him on.
“Travel with Sex Spot, would you,” asked Jamie, when we were finally ready to leave Piping Rock, and I have to say the knee-deep straw bedding in Sex Spot’s area, looked inviting.
So despite his reputation for kicking and biting while traveling, I was too tired to care and slept with my head on a hay net beside him. Still on jet lag, made worse by five days of four o’clock wake up calls, I slept the whole way back to Bryn Mawr Farms.
“Look at the city lights ma’am,” yelled Billy. “You just have to look at the lights.”
In those days traffic went right through New York City. There were no freeways.
How could I have slept at such a time but I did! Occasionally, through straw-laden dreams I saw the lights of Fifth Avenue.
“There,” said Jamie, “Sex Spot never trod on you during the whole journey. Even when you were asleep he took good care of you.”
As the show season came to an end and hunting began, Sarah and I would be up at four most mornings. It was taken for granted that we would work our butts off. Everyone was roped in to help. In fact many parents insisted their children stay to help, particularly during the hunting season, when we were so busy. It would teach them about hard work, the parents said. The best of them, much to their credit, soon learned to plait tails. This miserable job was always done at dawn by the light of an inadequate light bulb. With the fingers going numb, it was a fussy and difficult job.
The “Fun” of Hunting
My job, year in and year out, was to escort Sex Spot and his small pig-tailed owner out hunting. Here was a girl who had learned how to plait early in life, with her own waist-length braids. Out hunting, I was to look after her. Well, nothing of the sort happened, of course, and far from following me in the hunting field, I usually found myself trailing along in her wake trying vainly to keep her in my sights. Sex Spot would be farting and snorting with the squealing child atop him, trying to stop him.
She got the hunt staff thoroughly ticked off for cutting in under the noses of their horses. Little menace that he was, he would only be spotted at the last minute. There was the huntsman with his eye on yonder far green hill spying our fox, when all at once his horse’s forelegs would be swiped from under him by this blinding white furry flash. I had to follow this act, spreading apologies right and left and hoping I’d never have to take her out again. But like childbirth, horrible pain does get forgotten. There I’d be a week or so later, by the very same covert with that same squawking child being carted off…again. Next time we’ll get sent home I used to think, but there was something about Sex Spot, and we never were.
Posted August 29, 2016