The Horseman's Word

The lower depths of my mind increasingly resemble a scrapyard, littered with the unused parts, offcuts, and scraps of finished and abandoned projects, intentions, and ambitions. I suppose it's the same for everyone, after the inevitable decluttering of midlife, although it does seem that most of us are able to go the extra step, and somehow manage periodically to jettison the junk. I, however, haven't (or can't, or won't). I like junk too much; there are few simple pleasures as acute as finding a new use for some old, half-forgotten cast-off, or even just rummaging through a mental drawer, looking for one thing and finding another, even better thing.

I suspect this may go back to my childhood. My father was a top-notch mechanic and bodger – necessary skills of self-reliance learned as a despatch rider, navigating solo to vaguely-defined, mobile destinations on a motorbike or truck in wartime France, the Western Desert, and Burma – and he took pride in maintaining and repairing our family car. I would often accompany him to Jack's Hill, a breaker's yard just outside town, where scrapped vehicles and components lay quietly rusting in tall, rough-sorted heaps. Somewhere in there would be just the right part for the job. All that was needed was patience, luck, and a good eye.

I've talked about the usefulness of a well-stocked mental cellar before, and the role of subconscious mechanisms in fetching up just the right thing at the right time (De Profundis). I've learned to trust my impulses. For example, when photographing in various natural history collections in recent years, I would often find myself unaccountably attracted to the skeletal remains of frogs. Surrounded by the grandeur of dinosaurs and other spectacular creatures, this may have seemed odd, but when the "subconcious alert" light goes on, I know to simply do what I'm told. It was only recently that I came to realise why it was that frog skeletons, of all things, had been triggering the warning light.

Among many might-have-beens that have left their wreckage in the mnemonic midden are various unwritten novels. Like most people with a liking for reading, a facility with writing, and imaginative tendencies, I'd always assumed I'd probably get around, sooner or later, to writing at least a few of the stories that have been fermenting in my head for decades. It's taken me a long time to concede the simple truth that a writer is a person who writes, and a novelist is a person who writes novels. A person who merely thinks about writing novels, however intensely, is a daydreamer. Writing this blog is about as far as my writing career is likely to go. My real, actual, creative accomplishment, such as it is, is entirely visual.

But, as many practising novelists have confirmed, doing the preliminary research is more than half the fun, and I've enjoyed doing a fair bit of that over the years, filling out the background of imagined scenarios that might have become something more substantial, if I'd only sat down and actually started writing. One such scenario involved the horsemen of East Anglia who, in the days when heavy horses were the all-purpose engines of farming, formed a secretive elite among agricultural labourers – sometimes known as the Horseman's Word – that, in effect, was a secret society, fraternal guild, apprenticeship scheme, and trade union rolled into one. Their skill at handling those magnificent beasts was legendary, and to the outsider this skill could look rather like magic. Indeed, a certain amount of hocus pocus was used to protect and conceal the tricks of the trade: it did no harm to be regarded as the exclusive possessors of special powers.

Inevitably, others have by now written horse-handling novels. I suppose I should read The Horseman's Word by Roger Garfitt, but probably won't; it is on my Kindle, but so are many other unread impulse downloads. More interesting are the various factual books published on the subject. For example, George Ewart Evans, the folklorist and agricultural historian of East Anglia, wrote Horse Power and Magic (Faber, 1979), which gives a fairly down-to-earth account of the place of the horsemen on the farms of Norfolk and Suffolk. More recently, Russell Lyon wrote The Quest for the Original Horse Whisperers (Luath Press, 2003), which gives some very detailed accounts of the sort of practices that accompanied the breaking of horses, breeding, foaling, and the many bits of practical "magic" that could bend a working team of powerful horses to the handler's will. All of which would make for a finely detailed, if dull, story of life on the farm in the years before steam engines and tractors began to replace 'eavy 'osses. But what fascinated me was that element of hocus pocus, and in particular the ritual that was said to enable a man to attain a whole new level of power over his equine charges.

Rather like Robert Johnson's midnight tryst at the crossroads that was alleged to have given him exceptional ability with the guitar, certain horsemen were said to have "been to the river", and thereby acquired an ability to control horses that defied explanation, even by other skilled horsemen. The details of the ritual involved vary, but the essence of it required the capture and killing of a toad, which was then hung from a bush or pegged on an anthill until all the flesh had been picked clean. The bones were then carried about in a pocket or a bag until fully dried out. Then, on a full moon at midnight (when else?), the bones were carefully floated in a stream: all except one would be swept away by the current. The possession of that remaining, fork-shaped bone supposedly granted its owner an uncanny level of control over horses. He had been to the river, and become a "toadsman" [1].

So, typically, something I had forgotten all about but never discarded has been resurrecting itself at the opportune moment: just the right bits emerging at just the right time from the scrapheap in order to start off something new. If it's a book, it will be a book of pictures, of course, and certainly not a book of words. At least, not primarily; a combination could work quite well, not least for anyone for whom the connection between horses and amphibians is less than obvious. Sadly, as with the wasps, I don't anticipate many people wanting to hang batrachian-themed pictures on their walls. Big, beautiful horses and old boys in flat caps and waistcoats, maybe; skeletal, spectral frogs and toads, not so much. They're cold, ugly things, even fully clothed, with a certain uncanny menace about them; I'll never forget my mother's shriek when one popped up underfoot in the coal bunker one dark night. Although it has to be said that newts do have a certain sleek charm. It's a shame the horsemen had no known use for them. Or, who knows, maybe they did...

1. A more likely scenario, of course, is that this is the equivalent of an engineering apprentice being sent on a hunt for a left-handed spanner. Having been persuaded to go about this fiddly bit of witchery, the candidate surely ends up spilling the lot into the water in the darkness, at which point the other toadsmen spring from concealment, pull down his breeches, and smear his nether parts with horse dung, or some other initiatory humiliation. He is then catechized, congratulated, and sworn to secrecy ("The first rule of Toad Club..."), then handed his symbolic toad's bone, and a copy of The Book of the Toadfolk, containing many cunning recipes and horse-handling techniques.