This week: Craig writes about his son’s love affair with horses
I have a picture of The Boy that I keep close to my heart. It’s a chilly morning – I’m guessing early Spring, 2016. The sky is clear and the sands glow radiant gold with the whisper of warmer days. The Boy is a dot, wrapped up in a bundle of coats and scarves like a little parcel, a big smile framed by bright red cheeks and a stripey bobble hat. He’s riding a donkey called Bonnie across the beach at Weston-Super-Mare, and my dad takes long strides beside him with a fistful of reins, pipe jutting from the corner of his mouth, as proud as punch.
The Boy would never let us visit my parents in Portishead unless a visit to Bonnie at “Wezzun” was scheduled in. Sometimes she was being ridden by another, sometimes we got there to find that “Bonnie” had miraculously changed colour and even size. But there always was a donkey called Bonnie.
Heading back to Salisbury, at the junction onto the M4, there was a field below the roundabout where they kept retired donkeys. This, we told The Boy, was where Bonnie would come when she got too old to carry children on the beach. She would be okay, we assured him, because she would be with lots of friends. Silently, he would stare at the field with wide eyes, his little mind whirring away.
I can’t recall exactly when the riding lessons began,but it wasn’t long after that time. I remember him moving between two stables, the mostly at Grovely on the outskirts of Wilton. There, he was inducted into all things equine: the tacking up, the grooming, the hacks. Despite his asthma, the heady scents of the stables – the hay, sawdust, and steam lifting off the horses’ flanks – quickly worked their way into his blood. In short, he was hooked.
From day one, The Boy never looked anything less than perfect on a horse. It was as if some invisible cord lowered from the clouds gently hooked him up into a perfect posture of grace and serenity. Right there, in that first connection between child and beast, something instinctive and innate had germinated. From the moment he mounted, his breathing slowed down, his head was up, and his vision clear. All the trauma, conflict and uncertainly, temporarily dissipated. At the time, I remember another parent expressing surprise that Brodie, the horse he rode, wasn’t his own: such was confidence with which he handled her. To watch him ride was a privilege, even an indulgence: riding became the ultimate therapy for him and also for us, his ground-locked parents and captivated audience.
In the Grovely years, Brodie quickly became the love of his life. She was a handsome chestnut mare that he chose to ride whenever possible. He could handle other ponies perfectly well, no matter how obstinate; but Brodie was his default: he ate, slept and breathed her. When away from the stables, his imaginative role-play took him back there. Our dressing gown cords became head collars; laundry airers turned into jumps; our shed was his tack room. Later, unlike his peers, he chose Star Stables Pony Club above Minecraft or Fortnite.
When we moved to Dorset, we worried that taking The Boy from Grovely (and, more poignantly, Brodie) was going to be a wrench akin to grief. The staff there had all been so kind and patient – he often spent whole Saturdays at the place, helping with classes, mucking out stables and stealing precious, private moments with a pony he saw as his own. But we needn’t have worried about the wrench. While RACSC Bovington was a very different operation to Grovely, he loved the lessons there from the outset. The warmth and sense of community remained; but now that he had moved into a group of older riders, more was expected: control, resilience, discipline. Where he might have struggled to meet expectations that, for him, in everyday life seemed so unsurmountable; on horseback at Bovington, he was lapping up every instruction with a voracious hunger for learning everything about horses.
He’s never forgot Brodie, but his generous heart had now found capacity for another: Mac, a stocky dark chocolate-coloured pony with a twinkle in his eye. We have come to realise that wherever he may be, The Boy will always find a pony he can love. Ponies never contradict, they never reprimand nor humiliate either. For these reasons, our lad will always gravitate towards horses.
Half an hour later, his time has come. Suddenly, he’s hurtling around the course on a horse he’s only started riding fifteen minutes before, and I can hear his trainer call, ‘Keep control! Keep control!’ It’s terrifying. Somehow, he’s clearing the fences and sticking to the course; but my wife and I sense what is either sheer panic or exhilaration as the pony beneath him steadily gains momentum. Thankfully, after what seems like an eternity, he has finally completed the course, and his pony slows to a trot.
He’s been riding at Bovington for a couple of months now, and on this one Friday morning over half term, we found ourselves at a showjumping event – his first. We hadn’t realised until shortly before that formal equestrian attire was the requirement, so the days before saw us scouring Wiltshire and Dorset to eventually acquire a smart riding jacket, a Pony Club tie and navy jodhpurs. On the evening before the event, he discovered that Mac was lame – he’d be doing his first showjumping event on a horse he’d never ridden before. He was excited but agitated – the next morning even more so. It was now twenty minutes before the event. He was running around the course like a loon with two girls in his group, still in his red tracksuit, and having had no practice whatsoever with the substitute pony. I wondered and worries about what was going through his head.
As he left the arena, there was a warm ripple of applause, and someone called out his name. For the first time in two minutes, I released my breath. All was okay. He hadn’t come off; none of his limbs were broken: it was over. I looked to my wife and she stared back, blowing out through her cheeks. I knew she wasthinking the same thing: thank Christ for that.
Relief turned out to be a sly precursor to pride. As he disappeared behind the barriers of the practice arena to then make his way back to us, our hearts swelled with joy. We knew the elation and adrenalin that would be pumping through his veins. I for one felt as though I could burst.
We hugged him tightly once he found his way back to us. ‘You were brilliant,’ we said. It’s what parents always say – we knew that – but we really, really meant it. I felt a hot pricking behind my eyes, barely hearing his excited babble as he relived every turn and jump of his round. We were either side of him, arms around him as we turned to walk away, barely noticing the crackle of the Tannoy – until we caught it saying his name.
It is then that we heard. Caught up in the moment, none of us had remembered that this had always been a competition. The Boy had come first.
Driving back to Worth, I thought back to that picture of him on Bonnie, Dad beside him. I wished the old man had been here with us. He would have been so proud. I thought about the move to Dorset, the rollercoaster ride of adjusting to a new home, a new school. Given all that had challenged him, he had coped so well thus far, and finding Bovington has seemed like some kind of justification for all the trials we’d carried him through over these last few months. But now, seeing him clutch his rosettes and see him recognise that, finally, that there was something he could do fantastically well, this seemed so much more than mere justification.
For The Boy and for us, this was the way ahead.
©Craig Ennew 2025
- New Year’s Eve, Lulworth Cove
- Coincidence?
- St Oswald’s Bay, Jurassic Coast
- Autumn at The Fells
- West Lulworth, Dorset
- Thirty-Eight: Two Legs Good, Eight Legs Bad
- Sherborne, Dorset
- Thirty-Seven: In for the Long Haul
- Petronas Towers, KL, Malaysia
- Batu Caves, KL, Malaysia
- Chinatown, KL, Malaysia
- Thirty-Six: All Going East!
- Redang Beach Resort, Malaysia
- Coral Island Resort, Redang
- Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
- Thirty-Five: A Farewell to the Close
- Thirty-Four: Windows and Doors
- The Boat Shed Cafe, Lulworth Cove
- The Fells, West Lulworth
- Thirty-Three: Old Friends
- Moreton, near Dorchester
- Thirty-Two: Bottled Up
- Lulworth Cove, Dorset
- Thirty-One: Another One Fights the Dust
- The Fells, West Lulworth: BBQ with a view
- Lulworth Cove: our first night
- Leaving Worth Vegas!
- Thirty: Channelling Alan
- The Garden of ‘The Shack’, West Lulworth, Dorset
- Twenty-Nine: Worth its Weight in Gold
- From the Cove looking towards Portland Bill, West Lulworth
- Twenty-Eight: Schools for Thought
- Dancing Ledge, Purbeck
- Bridport, Dorset
- West Bay, Dorset
- Arne RSPB Nature Reserve, Dorset
- Moors Valley Country Park, Dorset
- Twenty-Seven: Spring Forwards, Fall Back
- Twenty-Six: The Square and Compass
- Twenty-Five: About a Boy
- Twenty-Four: The ‘A’ Word
- The Priest’s Way, Swanage
- Twenty-Three: Why did the chicken jump on the trampoline?
- Twenty-Two: The Shape of Sundays
- Twenty-One: Who’s Gonna Drive You Home?
- Twenty: Keep the Change, Ya Filthy Animal
- Nineteen: A Fork in the Road
- Wareham, Dorset
- Eighteen: Elephants and Coat-hangers
- Seventeen: There is a Light…
- Sixteen: Twas the Night Before Christmas
- Fifteen: Christmas in Limboland
- Fourteen: Goodbyes
- Thirteen: Jumping at the Cupboard Knobs
- Twelve: When Good Neighbours Become Good Friends
- Eleven: A Cackle of Hyenas
- Ten: Turning the Page
- Durdle Door, Dorset
- Nine: A Wait on Our Minds
- Eight: Clouds on the Horizon
- Seven: The Naked Man Story
- Six: All Pets are Off
- Five: Space Exploration
- Four: Bungalows and Builders
- Three: Bland Designs
- Two: Killing Pianos
- One: Funky Little Shack
All Going South 
Leave a reply to Anonymous Cancel reply