It's hard to take on board that this was the center of my life for so long - it seemed like so long, anyway: in reality, probably four or five years, although my connections with this stable yard went longer. This was the Ridgway School of Equitation - which now seems an absurdly grand title, and no wonder it shifted, in more recent times, to Ridgway Stables - and as I noted a few years back, it closed, and the brewery that owns it put it up for sale. There are complicated clauses that mean that some stables have to be kept - for horses - even if the front part of the yard is redeveloped, and that presumably is why it doesn't sell. But it breaks my heart to see it grassed over, and sagging, and collapsing. I can still take you down the boxes from the top of the yard: Sheik, Osina, Master Manikin, The Mad Hatter, Laska (she then moved down to the bottom), Snuff, Peter, Kingpin ... But of course it wasn't as easy as that: they kept moving around (apart from the top boxes), and similarly they keep sliding around from one box to another in my memory - a great rush of bay and grey and brown and chestnut coats and manes and tails.
It was, serendipitously, at the end of our street: I'd be here every day after school . and sometimes before, helping to muck out and make up the straw bedding, and refill water buckets, and catch buckets of feed thrown down from the hayloft at the end, and hang up haynets, and groom them, and put on their saddles and bridles, and polish the tack afterwards, and hope upon hope that I'd get a free ride out of this ... but these are all now very distant ghosts.
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