Jeremy James - Vagabond: A Horseback Adventure from Bulgaria to Berlin

A horseback adventure from Bulgaria to Berlin

Jeremy James

Jeremy Jamess easy-going style as informal as chat leaning on the bar of a wayside drinking hall with a weather-eye for his grazing horse is so much more often hit than miss that one cant help suspecting, after a time, that the philistinism or the pretence of it, that he scatters about his pages is a tease. He lets give-away sparks of cultivation escape. The oversights may make an aesthete moan, but the insights are instinctively sound and perceptive, always warm and generous and, again and again, extremely funny. He is particularly adept at piecing together the companionable blinds and hangovers of ones youthful travels in wild places but the heroes of the book are neither the author, nor the denizens of south-eastern Europe, nor the landscape but the two steeds he bought off the gypsies in Bulgaria and Rumania.

These pages are hard to beat and, here and there, the readers eyes prickle as though we were reading Black Beauty for the first time, in the gorges of the Great Balkan Range, or in the Carpathian uplands or on the Puszta.

We are carried in his wake across the Puszta, through Slovakia and the plains of Poland and through Eastern and Western Germany at a time of great political change. There are moments of doubt and acute anxiety, but by the time he is safe home in the Welsh mountains all early reservations have vanished and the author has us eating out of his hand.

Patrick Leigh Fermor

Now a horse is a fine lady among animals, flighty, timid, delicate in eating, of tender health: he is too valuable, too sensitive to be left alone, so that you are chained to your brute as to a fellow galley-slave: a dangerous road puts him out of his wits; in short, hes an uncertain and exacting ally and adds thirty-fold to the troubles of the voyager...

Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes

Robert Louis Stevenson

Im sorry to telephone you on a Saturday afternoon but my friend has done good work in Sofia and has found you two horses, one black, one white. It was Mr Popof from the Bulgarian Embassy.

Id asked for black and white horses: that is to say, piebald.

Ah.

The white one is eight years old, the black one is also eight years old.

Ah. You can BUY them in Sofia and the price is how can I say? the price is er I cannot think the price is, must be, let me see, with all saddles and bridles and everything all you need is riding boots and breeches!

Ah.

The price is very good, what is? Hello? maybe, well, maybe ... about ... 5 or maybe 8,000 dollars ... Hello? Hello? Mr Dchames? Hello? Of course these figures can be discussed and you can in Sofia ... Hello? Mr Dchames? Hello?

Strewth.

See you in Heathrow Mr Dchames?

Strewth. And outside the sun was roaring away, bulbs in the garden were exploding, a thrush was singing and lambs were bawling their heads off. I didnt have 5 or 8,000 dollars. Not any more. I did, once, for a while: a short while, just after Pelham gave it to me. But what with one thing and another itd gone. Advances are like that. Now you have them, now you dont. Now I didnt. What could I do?

This was serious worrying time: a bit of a jam. Thing was, I didnt want to go anyway, not with all that sunshine and spring.

Then a thought occurred: I thought maybe, maybe the money, or lack of it, was the way out. Maybe Id just have to go to Bulgaria, then ring Roger in Pelham to tell him I couldnt do this ride because it was too expensive and hed say OK, forget it so I could come back and loaf around here all summer instead.

But it wasnt that easy.

Thing was Id gone and committed myself in other ways: like Gonzo, my horse, for instance. Id found him another home. And Dolly my Welsh pony and Punch my bull terrier, theyd got homes.

I set out to ride Gonzo to Norfolk to the ILPH (International League for the Protection of Horses) but sixteen miles down the road wound up in Jane Lennoxs place and Jane wound up with Gonzo. Sixteen miles.

Dolly went home to Alan Watkin, her rightful owner just across the fields from here and Punch was in Devon with Mark Alderson, and Mark was going through this divorce business, hadnt got himself a house sorted out and already had a bull terrier anyway. And what worried me about it was Mark knew Punch, and knew about his funny little habits, so why did he agree to it? I mean why did he want to look after him? I know about Punchs funny little habits too. I have to pay for them. I had to pay for a new seat for Sids motorbike, and for his tractor door, and for Sues sofa to be restuffed and for her feather cushions to be restuffed and her elderly teddy bear to be restuffed. I just knew if I went away Id come home to a massive restuffing bill. But it was done now, and he was in Devon, Gonzo was with Jane and Dolly was across the fields.

So, with all my animals gone, and air tickets bought, I was badly committed and everybody was expecting me to go.

Jeff Aldridge was expecting me to go. He said so one night when I was at his place round about closing time, down at The Crown. He got quite interested in me going. He said so. In fact he got very excited about it.

Go away! he said, Go on! Get out! Go away! And dont come back for six months!

He even helped me to the door.

Who can resist encouragement like that?

So there I was mooching around in the garden one Saturday afternoon in all this sunshine and missing my animals when Mr Popof rang, which seemed to put the lid on everything, so I locked up the cottage, slung the saddles and saddlebags in the car, and went down to the Cotswolds to Chumpie, who was coming along. So she thought.

I drove a glorious sunny two hours to Gloucestershire and arrived to find her faffing about in a pile of saddlery, organising what looked like a major cavalry campaign, with sutures, syringes, bandages, whipping cord, needles, blood transfusion things, little boxes of gut-rot pills, water purification tablets: all the kind of stuff I wouldnt have bothered with. And she was babbling on about visas for Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, and Poland, and what made me so sure Id get into East Germany? And to tell you the truth, Id only got a couple of visas because its such a drag trying to get hold of them and there are a million things Id rather do than write tedious letters off to dusty embassies asking about visas. Besides I didnt want to do any of this trip and had this secret plan of ringing Roger from Bulgaria to tell him it was all off. But I could hardly let on to Chumpie, could I?

So just to make a show of things I set about shoving the saddles into their bags, which was about as much fun as pushing calves back into cows, then burst all the citronella bottles and got so angry I felt like ditching the whole lot in the Windrush, going to get all my animals and pushing off back home, and to hell with the consequences.

Anyway, I wont bore you to death with any more of that, or what it was like hanging around at Heathrow in blazing sunshine waiting for a plane which I hoped had conked out somewhere, and wandering around trying to find Mr Popof.

When he does turn up I expect hell just pop-off the other end, Chumpie said.

When he arrived he introduced himself straightaway, and once on the plane had the sense to sit with a friend, so sparing us the agony of having to talk.

Three and a half hours later we came barrelling in over the Balkans in a storm, landing with a big bounce in Sofia airport in pouring rain, got collected by Penko Dinev, a friend of Julian Popofs, in a rattling gas-propelled Moskovitch, were driven through gloomy backstreets, arriving some time later halfway up a mountain, at a small private hotel where the bog was reluctant and the washing arrangements shared.