One of the things we’ve noticed after getting our courses up and running again is the sheer variety of people we work with. We talk about helping veterans, but that group is composed of such various individuals. You might get someone who served for twenty-five years and who is in the second half of life. You might get someone in their thirties, who went into the forces at nineteen and saw five years of service. There will be people who saw Aden, or Northern Ireland, or Iraq. You’ll talk to one person who spent years on submarines and another who worked in logistics.
We’ve had serving men with us this summer too, and that’s a whole other hill of beans. The veterans can tell you everything; the ones still serving can’t. Some of their work is classified, and they are taught to compartmentalise. We find ourselves privately guessing about some of the things they have to do.
We’ve had a children’s course, organised by Aberdeen council, where the team had to rise to the challenges of special needs. Some of the kids were on the autism spectrum, some had learning disabilities, some had sad challenges in their home life. (We hate the word disability and rarely use it. We don’t find it useful. But in some cases we have to write it, for simple ease of comprehension.)
We’ve had veterans and families courses too, where we’ve welcomed very young children for the first time. That was interesting for us, and we spent weeks beforehand planning a variety of activities for them, to keep them interested. It turns out that if you have chickens and dogs and miniature horses, you’ve got everything a small child adores.
And what have we tried to give to all these different people? Pretty much the same thing – renewed confidence, a sense of connection, a belief in themselves. Some of them simply need a break, and they get that, here in these mighty Scottish hills. But they find camaraderie and friendship too, and a feeling of togetherness. The moment they find other veterans, they know they will speak the same language.
The children have found fun and a sense of purpose. We teach them new skills and we encourage them to move out of their comfort zone, so they they leave with a belief that they can do more than they think they can. We believe in the young people, and we always want them to fulfil their potential.
For a young man with a severe learning disability, HorseBack is simply a place that makes him smile, as he sits behind our gentle mare, Ellie-May, and listens to the laughter in the arena. For a serviceman in an intense role, the wide valley is a place where he can come to let off steam and give his stretched mind a rest. For our veteran mentors, HorseBack is more like a family – people and a place they can come back to, over and over again, to remind themselves of the best of themselves, because it was here that they found that.
And what makes us smile so much is that the horses are the same with everyone – kind, willing, gentle, empathetic. The amount of love and happiness that they have generated could power a city. They don’t care who comes through our gates, they will give every inch of themselves. The messages we get after a course often ask after the horses – the messages will not be so much for us, but for Rodney, or Poppy, or Deano, or Blue. They create memories, these horses, in the minds of the young and the old, and those memories are precious things.
