Melanie Reid broke her neck and back falling from a horse in April 2010 and spent 12 months in rehab. This week, she ponders her horse fixation
It’s a shame this issue of the magazine doesn’t have scratch and sniff pages, because nothing would evoke the Jubilee better. Smell takes you back in an instant: to the Fifties, and the fusty, elderly floors we crawled on, the muskiness of our mothers’ fur coats. The Sixties smelt of coal-tar soap and wet dog; the Seventies of Southern Comfort and Camels; in the Eighties, it was vin chaud and melting raclette. The Nineties were scented by clean baby and Sudocrem. And so on.
If personal history is catalogued in olfactory memory, then my bet is the Queen marks the decades by the dense walls of perfume that she has to walk through. After all, if you’re going to meet her, it’s what you do, isn’t it – dress up and douse yourself in your best scent? Her Seventies must have reeked of Opium. And the Eighties? You can imagine her kicking off her shoes of an evening: “Philip, one more lungful of Poison and I shall abdicate.”
But there are constants too. Some people contend the most familiar smell in her 60 years on the throne has been that of fresh paint, but I disagree. I reckon it’s the heady, addictive whiff of horses. I’m sure it’s what keeps her going. You wonder why she beams as she trundles along the Mall in her carriage? Because that delicious aroma of fresh dung, leather, saddle soap and hot, sweet horse is filtering through her gills like a basking shark feeding on plankton. Eau de Household Cavalry has been her sanity for 80-odd years.
I recognise this, of course, because I adore the same smell. An eclectic band, from HM to Katie Price to millions of little girls, many now middle-aged, belong to this faintly embarrassing masonic sisterhood. How it strikes is a mystery. Maybe it’s a cult; maybe a virus; some (men, naturally) think it’s down to erotic obsession and fetishism. Whatever. Our brains are totally washed; a flame of passion ignited. One woman brave enough to break cover recently is Susanna Forrest. “I was imprinted like a goose when I was only a few months old,” she admits in her delicious book If Wishes were Horses: A Memoir of Equine Obsession.
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In 1969, academics found that, among little girls, playing horses was almost as popular as playing hospitals. (Now, granted, probably more playing X Factor.) Forrest says: “Across Europe, North America and Australasia, millions of little girls galloped, snorted and pawed the ground as their mothers had done before them, dreaming of one birthday morning when they’d wake up and there would be a pony picking at the lawn under their window. And nobody questioned this. Why? Where does it all begin?”
Why indeed? My earliest memories were of riding the back of the sofa, a skipping rope for reins. Or roping my amiable big sister, so I could drive her up and down and around the garden. The afflicted will share these universal memories. There was a real live animal to base the fantasies on – Polly, my cousin’s pony, who lived at my grandmother’s home, where we spent our summers. Polly was an epic presence in my life: I worshipped her. If I was good, I was allowed to open the door to my cousin’s tack room, a walk-in cupboard, where I would spend hours breathing in deep drafts of saddle soap, gazing longingly up at the forbidden treasures – martingales, bits, reins, double bridles, cruppers, crops, side reins. Some psychologists apparently identify this as “stuff fetishism” and the sado-masochistic trappings of domination. All I can say is, what a kinky child I must have been.
Back home, as soon as I could hold a pen, I drew pictures of horses compulsively on the back of unwanted engineering drawings my father brought home. My parents, although wary of this strange madness, grudgingly fashioned for me a hobby horse, made from old leather and a broom handle, whom I immediately christened Polly, too. With her, I felt complete; fulfilled; fused into a centaur which would paw the ground, neigh and prance and canter everywhere.
On family journeys, one escaped from the boredom of the back seat of the car or the train to gallop across country alongside, soaring over huge hedges and ditches for endless miles. Every horse-mad little girl I know did the same. As Forrest says, horses made reality better. A horse embodied the liberation inherent in all fantasy. It freed you from the mundane.
When Polly disintegrated from wear and tear, I moved onto imaginary steeds. Now I was bounded only by my imagination. I created a vast stable of animals: blacks, bays, greys and chestnuts. They all had names and personalities and shared the ability to jump over the Moon. Inspired by Pat Smythe’s Jump for Joy (borrowed from the library every second week) I created Olympic courses in the garden – spreads, oxers and triples built from flowerpots, dustbins, broom handles, canes, hoes, shovels, upturned buckets. Hours were spent competing against myself on different horses; I can’t remember when I stopped, but it may, tragically, have been as old as 14.
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Forty years on, body irretrievably wrecked by falling at a jump – sometimes one should not dwell on life’s ironies – I am a centaur again, practising for my first para-dressage competition on Nelly next week. Sara, my teacher, is pleased with me. “We have crossed a line,” she says. “Up until now, I taught you with my eye on your vulnerabilities, always ready to intervene. Now, I’m teaching you as I would any horse and rider, trying to create improvement. We’ve been set free.”
Indeed. And in my little girl’s head, I am not only free, but living the fantasy once more. The smell of leather and hot horse, I’m glad to say, is as good as it ever was.