My grandfather Robert ‘Bertie’ Meikle bred Clydesdales, the Scottish draught horses which are similar to, but slightly smaller than the related English Shires. Grandad’s most notable achievement as a breeder was a champion stallion called Dunsyre Footprint.
My mother worked with Clydesdales as a girl and told us Grandad would sometimes send her out to plough with horses after she came home from school. She was very fond of the animals and admired their power, intelligence and gentleness. After finishing work in the fields, she unhitched them and they would make their own way back to the farm. Her favourite horse mastered escaping from his loose box at night by putting his head over the door and drawing the bolt with his teeth. He could also switch on the lights in the outhouse by turning the knob on the old-fashioned rotary switches. He didn’t bother switching the lights off again.
There had been working horses on the Ayrshire farm where I was brought up but they were gone by the time I was born in 1954. We still had a stable with horse stalls and racks and pegs on the walls for saddles and tack, but it was only used for the storage of fodder, yellow cans of Snowcem masonry paint, and as a nursery for the collie dogs when they had pups. I was very keen to have a horse and at an early age, about 5, I was given a Fell Pony called Happy. She stood a respectable 14 hands high. My grandfather took me up to the attic of his farm, Hardengreen near Dalkeith, to select bridles and a saddle from tack that had once belonged to my mother and her sister.
Happy was older than me, smarter than me, and a lot bigger than me. She had been the family pony for the children of one of the surgeons at Ballochmyle Hospital for most of her 14 years. They had christened her Happy and she had learned a lot about the riding game. Obsessed with the Lone Ranger, I would have preferred she was called something like Silver. I couldn’t imagine her rearing up, with me aboard, waving my cowboy hat and shouting a hearty, ‘Hi-yo Happy, away!’ Champion the Wonder Horse was more my idea of a proper horse and Ty Hardin, as Bronco Lane, the model for a cowboy.
I remember the day the horse box arrived. The rear door opened and Happy looked back at me over her right shoulder with suspicion. As you can see from the photograph, she was shod when she arrived and the farrier would attend from time to time in his beaten-up Land Rover to see to her feet. As soon as we were fully acquainted, a battle of wills developed. My big cousins had horses that would come to you when you whistled. Happy had to be caught. Being so young, I needed help and Dad would recruit the men to corner Happy in her field and get a halter on her. She was very good at evading capture, sprinting off through any gaps, displaying an energy not at all in evidence when she was being ridden. Eventually I developed my own technique involving hiding the halter behind my back while rattling a pail of oats – which she couldn’t resist.
My cousin Anne undertook my training as a junior horseman. She had an elegant pacer named Vanity, and Happy enjoyed her company. I learned to mount and dismount properly, facing the tail rather than the head – unlike my cowboy heroes. I learned to post during the trot to avoid getting bounced out of the saddle at every stride. We sometimes went to the neighbouring Dumfries House Estate and rode through the ruins of Taringzean Castle by the river Lugar – which evoked a much earlier era of equestrianism.
Happy knew lots of tricks. Apart from avoiding capture, she also knew how to inflate her chest when the girth was being tightened so that the saddle became loose when she breathed out. This meant the saddle slipped down when you put your weight into the stirrup. In the course of trying to record me riding off into the sunset in full cowboy regalia, my father managed to capture a consecutive sequence of these mishaps on cine film. Each time it happened I would turn round and wave at him to stop filming. He didn’t edit this and the family found it very funny. Despite promising he wouldn’t, he showed this footage at the staff children’s Christmas party to hilarious effect. I can now enjoy it all over again having transferred my father’s 5 hours of cine to digital format. I never lived it down – but I did learn to tighten her girth when she breathed out, prompted by a gentle nudge to her chest with my knee.
I was so keen on riding at that age that I would get up long before school to take Happy out. She was a creature of habit. Any indication that we would be going further than the usual trip was greeted with stubborn resistance, ears flattened, and circling on the spot. Sometimes in an open field she would take off at full speed, ears pricked. This was an indication that one should shorten the reins and take a tight grip of her mane. Shortly after take-off her ears would go back and she would stop dead, attempting to throw me over her head. I took a pride in being able to sit tight, and to be fair she always gave up after one attempt. I have to say that any time she pecked accidentally and I did come off, she was very good at avoiding tramping on me on the ground. On my back and winded, I usually still held the reins in one hand.
Happy was an ideal platform for getting up into trees with no accessible low branches. This was particularly useful for chestnut trees. She was immensely strong. I once tied her to one of the heavy cast iron ornamental chains that hung between the brick pillars surrounding the front garden. I brought an upturned pail up to her to use as a mounting block but she started at the noise it made when I dragged it across the ground, and she pulled down two of the pillars.
A more serious incident followed when I rode her into the car garage one morning. The garage had been a vehicle workshop before becoming a simple motor house and there were service pits under both bays covered over with old railway sleepers. Happy was very reluctant to go in and had to be urged forwards. Perhaps she was aware of something amiss underfoot. Unnoticed, the sleepers had rotted over the years and suddenly a couple of them gave way under the pony’s rear legs which dropped down into the gap. I slid off her back and into the service pit. Somehow I managed to grab a sleeper and hang on. An underground spring ran beneath the garage and the pit had filled up with black oily water which came up to my chest. I couldn’t reach the floor of the pit with my feet. My mother was working at the kitchen sink which was in front of a window looking out onto the yard. She looked up to see the pony bolting out of the garage, riderless. She ran to the garage and pulled me out by the wrists, to my great relief.
Mostly Happy was an immensely tolerant and docile companion. She never kicked and only occasionally stood on my welly-booted foot while pretending not to notice. She didn’t know how ridiculous I made her look by clipping her mane and tail like a racehorse. I discovered that Fell Ponies look a lot better left as nature intended.
As I reached my teens – and she reached her twenties – I became less interested in riding, then stopped altogether. Bicycles, then cars, took up my attention. In any case I had also outgrown her. A British native breed, Fell ponies can be ‘hefted’ and tolerate an outdoor life but I am ashamed that she was neglected and left to fend for herself in her later years. As a typical teenage boy, I was irresponsible and flighty. My parents should have taken an interest even if I didn’t. That is certainly the default position for most family pets, but particularly important for a large, intelligent animal like her. She eventually died in her field at the age of 28. By that time I was away at university.
The Bohemian Waxwing 