Candida Baker - The Heart of a Horse

Imagine this. Your life is going along in a certain direction and, to the best of your belief, you are happy with that trajectory. In my case, the year was 2000 and at that time I was enjoying success in almost every area of my life.

In my day job I was editor of The Weekend Australian Magazine; I was married to a writer, I was a stepmother to his children from previous marriages, and I was a mother to our son Sam, who was then eight, and to our new baby, Anna, a seemingly healthy and happy little girl, born when I was 45.

My second novel, The Hidden, my third work of fiction but about my tenth book to be published, had just come out and the reviews were uniformly positive. We owned a house on the Central Coast and one in Sydney, in Randwick, near Queens Park. I rode whenever I could, either in Centennial Park, or at farmstays or on trail rides, often with Sam, who by now had inherited my obsession with horses. It was never quite enough horse time, but in the middle of a very busy life, which also included our somewhat batty, high-maintenance German Shorthaired Pointer, Ella, it had to do.

Fast forward six years. My husband and I have lost all our real estate money due to involvement with a dodgy developer; weve moved to the Northern Rivers region in New South Wales (and unfortunately we separated soon after); Im a single mother with too many horses, working on the local newspaper for $22 per hour, struggling at every turn to make ends meet. I cant seem to write to save my life and part of the reason, I know, is that my beautiful daughter has not slept through the night since she was 18 months old (and will not for another gruelling four years), and nobody can work out why.

Im renting a cottage from a friend it has holes in the wooden floor straight down into the garden, and spiders and other creepy-crawlies come and go at will; its boiling in the summer and freezing in the winter; and it has virtually no mod cons; but it has views down to Lennox Head to die for. It has a garden and it has our three horses, and theres something the glimmer of a future yet to unfold that keeps me going, despite feelings of being an abject failure, of a life derailed, of being a hopeless mother, an obviously inadequate wife, in general not the person I wanted to be, or imagined I would be.

I was born into a theatrical and literary family in England. My father, George Baker, was a well known British actor; my mother an artist, costume designer and a great gardener; her father a poet, essayist, writer and publisher; her mother a reader for a publishing company. My fathers passion, apart from acting, was horses. Hed grown up as the child of diplomats in Bulgaria, riding horses in the country, and his grandfather had bred Cleveland Bays in Yorkshire.

So you could say I was beamed down with strong DNA from all these family strands Horses. Reading. Writing. Photography. Art. They have always been the main drivers for my life, but in the 15 years Ive lived in the Byron Bay region, another strand has made its presence increasingly felt, and that is, to sum it up in one word, spirituality.

So how did a child born into this family, in the United Kingdom, end up living in the Byron Shire? Growing up, I was very clear about what I wanted to be. I wanted to write books, breed horses and live in the country, but there were a few highways and byways ahead of me, a circuitous journey back to the self, with extraordinary life lessons taught by animals, and the majority of those by horses, the majestic creatures that have manifested themselves in my life in so many ways.

When I was five years old, and in hospital to have my tonsils out, my father bought me a copy of Black Beauty,and read it to me every day. (It was a long recovery process in those days!) It was as if hed opened a whole new magical world for me. So desperate was I to devour the book myself, that I learned to read, and then the strangest thing happened whatever he read to me, or I read to myself, I would dream that night in technicolour precision.

Since that time, almost 60 years ago, I dont think a night has gone by without me dreaming of horses. My horse dreams draw me into a level of creative and collective memory far richer than my horseless dreams.

By the time Black Beautyarrived in my life, I was already horse-obsessed; I thought of nothing else. My first ride was when I was about 18 months old. We were driving in the countryside on a family outing when we passed a farmer on his horse, walking down a quiet lane. I so much wanted to sit on the horse that my father stopped the car, asked the farmer if he would mind, and hey presto, there I was up high in the sky (the only thing I vaguely remember was looking down such a long, long way). Each time they tried to take me down, I cried and clung to the farmer and his horse.

In time, we moved to the country, and in further time, I became best friends with the local farmers daughter, Sally, who taught me to ride on her kind and gentle pony, Lucy, and later on her bigger pony, Mandy. When a pony finally arrived for me it was perhaps not such a suitable steed for a 13-year-old, an Arabian/Fell pony cross, bred especially for me. In the horse world theres an expression green on green that basically means dont put a young horse and a young rider together.