THE HORSE LISTENER
It’s in the blood CANDIDA BAKER ponders the question of what makes a ‘horsey’ person. Sometimes, she finds, it’s just in our DNA.
I
’m looking at an old newspaper clipping online, and there’s my surname staring out of the screen at me.
The newspaper is the York Herald, dated the 7th August 1888, and a Mr. F. P Baker is listed as having won best mare and foal in the Cleveland Bay class at the Wetherby Agricultural Show in Yorkshire. There are pages and pages of results from similar shows, and my greatgrandfather’s name is liberally dotted throughout. Here are a few things I remember. I remember - just - being put on the back of a horse by my father, who was acting in the film The Moonraker. I still have the photo, and sometimes I wonder if my memory is because of the photo, but I don’t think so, I think that it is a true memory.
A
I was always told by my parents that I was first put on a horse when I was 16 months old. We passed a farmer on the road, riding his horse home, and as I cried ‘’Orsie, ‘Orsie’, my Dad stopped the car, and asked him if he would mind if I sat on his horse. Apparently every time they took me off I cried.
tonsillitis and my father visiting me to read me Black Beauty. I loved it so much that I was determined to learn to read so I could read it to myself, and by the time I was six, I was doing just that. It was followed, as I grew older, by Silver Snaffles, The Wednesday Pony, Champion the Wonder Horse, Crin Blanc, Tam the Untamed, My Friend Flicka (and all the ensuing sequels), The Silver Brumby (and all the ensuing sequels), and well, you get the drift.
I remember being in hospital with
I grew up understanding that my Dad
30
HORSEVIBES MAGAZINE - APRIL 2019
loved horses, and he rode them well. He wasn’t, however, always a gentle horseman, and some of my earliest lessons in how I didn’t want to be around horses came from him. He was that generation of ‘tough’ horsemen, and by the time I was a teenager I could see that that the toughness itself often produced the opposite effect of the goal he desired. I also knew that his grandfather, my great-grandfather, Frances Baker bred Cleveland Bays from his home at
