George's new girlfriend

The history of George's new girlfriend.

Friends of mine have ten year old twin girls, both very pretty girls with delightful characters. Let's call them M and H. H rides their 13 hand pony happily and M's feet are dragging on the floor when she sits on her. So several weeks ago we set out to find another horse for her. She was insistent that she did not want a 14.2 pony, even though she would not be able to compete with children her own age unless she stuck to that height. So I invited her up here to ride George, thinking that it would make her realise that a 16 hand horse was too big for her.

Quite the reverse happened. She tacked him up unaided. She rode him on my outdoor arena which is unfenced and has a drop of eight feet down onto the road at one side and four feet into the field along another. Two of my adult friends will not ride on it because it scares them. She rode him better than I do, and ended up jumping a three foot fence.

So we went horse hunting, and found a really lovely four year old, 15.1 but still growing, tried him twice and it went well. He was very young and not long broken, but the M is an experienced very competent rider and he was as quiet as a lamb to ride and to handle - they bought him. We had been told he had been broken and ridden for eight weeks (I was told twelve, subsequently amended to eight when I wasn't around). After three days in his new home he exploded. He threw M into the wall of the school, and then an adult who tried to ride him. He was a different horse than the one we bought - the probability being that he had been working hard and was tired when we tried him, hence very quiet.

With some difficulty, he was returned as "not fit for purpose" to the dealer he was bought from. Allan did a valiant job negotiating the refund with Two Mills Sport Horses on the Wirral. If you buy a horse from those dealers, be aware that they will try their hardest to make you take an exchange and not give you a refund if the horse turns out to be not right. They took a LOT of persuading and it felt as if it was only because both Allan and I are trained negotiators and the mother has a tame solicitor as a friend that we convinced them.

So now we had a child whose nerve was shot to pieces, who thought she was a failure. I got her to come up again, and in the confines of the barn she rode George. She started on 10/10 fear rating, and ended on 0/10 with a grin on her face, even though he had spooked at a piece of string waving in the breeze. I made her ride Jazz in spite of the fact that she was very frightened. She needed to be made to sit on a really big horse so that when she went looking for one to buy, it would seem small. She started off refusing to let me move him, and ended up by saying "all right, once more round and then maybe I'll go home ........ maybe another time round and then I'll go home".

In the course of the next few days it became very obvious to me that three horses for the winter was not going to work for me. And that hunting would not "do it" for me if the weather wasn't perfect, and that George was therefore the horse with no job to do. I felt guilty all the time about not doing justice to any of them, but particularly for George being third horse in the rankings after all he has done for me this year in getting me riding after broken bones. I knew that to be fair to him, he needed a person of his own.

And here we had M, needing a horse and already in love with George. So I talked to her mother, and we agreed that they would come up tonight and I would take them out for a hack, which we have just done.

I took her out with Jazz, who was pretty good. We went up onto the field which George knows only as a place to gallop. This was deliberate. If M could not manage him there, then he is too much horse for her. Allan and the mother drove up to the field to watch. All went well as we hacked up the track to get to the top of the hill. M said that she did not want to canter today, and I said that was OK, but I hoped that after a trot she would be happy to canter.

We went through the gate onto the main field. I told her to trot, and she gave George just a tiny bit too much encouragement. And they were gone! He was off, galloping across the field. I had thought that might happen and I had told her that if it did, she was to stay in balance, stay with him, and that he would come back to her. I watched with my heart in my mouth as she reached the far side of the field, slowed him down, turned a circle. And stopped.

Jazz was going bananas but I was determined to give George no excuse for a race and he would have had to dump me to get to follow him before he had stopped. We cantered over to where she was now stood - with the broadest grin on her face you've ever seen. We walked up to the top where her Mum was waiting with her sister and Allan. M said "I think Mum has probably wet herself by now" and I said "she's not the only one!"

I wouldn't have thought now that there is any possibility of being able to keep the two of them apart. The plan is that while we are away for five days next week, they will liaise with our house-sitter and come up to see George several times, groom him and pet him. Then the following week, come and ride him several times. Then on Friday 24th I will deliver him to the isolation unit of their stables. They will move their pony next door to him to keep him company. Then for the next ten days the girls are off school and will be spending all day at the stables with George and Angel. This way, he will know that she is his person before he has to get used to a new place. I'm so pleased for him that we can keep his stress to a minimum like that.

They want to buy him, and I have said that they can, but not before Christmas. These people are good friends of mine and if anything at all happens, I would simply take George home again and we can all stay friends. He's a lot of horse for a ten year old and we all have to be sure that it really is the match made in heaven which it looks to be at the moment. Georgie is such a good natured creature that I can't believe it won't work out, and won't it be lovely for him if it does - a besotted blond angel of his own?

C