Register Interest / Attend A Course

Our Beautiful Red

Red (2)

A message comes in from our co-founder and the one who steers our ship, Emma Hutchison. ‘Absolutely devastated to have to tell you that we have lost our beautiful Red.’

Everyone who knows horses knows how this feels. You love them with all your heart and they are stitched into your daily life and you manage to convince yourself, somehow, that they will live forever. The rational mind knows that anything can get them – a sudden colic, a mystery infection, something with a Latin name that only the vet can pronounce – but the rational mind gets trumped, somehow, by the magical mind, which can’t conceive a world without the beloved creature in it.

Red was one of the greatest of the great mares, and we have written about her, more than once, ‘we can’t imagine HorseBack without her.’ Now we have to face that reality, and our hearts are aching.

Everybody loved Red. To meet her was to love her. She was one of the earliest of the HorseBack herd, arriving when the charity was just finding its feet, when Emma and Jock were seeing clearly their purpose, when the dream that was dreamed up over a kitchen table was being put into action and becoming real.

She immediately put her shoulder to the wheel.

She was a beauty, and exceptionally elegant, and quite self-contained. You might almost say that there was a faint mystery at the heart of her, as there so often is with great beauties. Yet, in all her loveliness and all her elegance, she was a grafter. She never shied away from work. She said yes to every question, and took more than her share of the load. She was utterly reliable, and if you look back at pictures of old courses, there is Red in almost every one.

She was kind and polite, but she didn’t throw her affection around indiscriminately. You always felt that if Red gave you her seal of approval you had earned it. Again, in the tradition of the great mares, she knew precisely what she liked and she was gently determined not to lower her standards.

But that discerning heart was ultimately generous. She opened it over the years to veterans with twenty different kinds of raging Post-Traumatic Stress, to people in chronic physical pain, to people who had trouble walking, to students who were lost and struggling at school, to the children of wounded veterans, to those who had to scoot about on mobility devices.

She counted them all in and she counted them all out and she never failed a single one of them.

For us, she was all pleasure, a sheer delight to have about the place. She was gentle and sweet and pretty and funny; she had a steely streak of courage; she knew exactly who she was. She had all the qualities that you would look for in a human. She was always there, at the very heart of things. She never made a fuss; there was no drama about her. But you always knew she was around, because she had such a presence – quiet yet charismatic, unshowy yet unmissable.

It’s very hard to believe that she’s not here any more. For a long time, we’ll look up, expecting to see her charming face. She was such a good person and such a steadying influence and she always brought sunshine to the dreichest day.

In the end, as always with those horses who gallop into the heart and stay there, we run out of words. We can ransack the thesaurus all we want, and find the best superlatives for her, but Red was, in the way that great companions are, beyond mere human words. We feel intensely lucky to have had the privilege of knowing her, of having her with us for so many happy years. We remain in awe of her great gifts, and of how selflessly she shared them.

She touched many lives and – as our veterans tell us – she changed lives and saved lives. She gets to rest now, and we get to miss her, and to thank her, over and over, for all she gave.

There will never be anyone quite like Red. She was a one-off, and she has taken her brilliance away with her, to that other realm, where she flies free.

Follow Us

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Pinterest

Recent Posts

We do not rely on government funding so any donations will greatly assist with the running of our charity.