When Sophie Met Darcy Day

Soon after that, her parents’ car pulled up outside. As she ran out to it, I called from the doorway, ‘Bye, Sophie. See you next week!’ and to my astonishment she called back, ‘Bye!’

Her mother phoned me during the week. ‘What on earth did you do?’ she asked. ‘She’s talking again completely normally, as if she had never stopped.’

‘We didn’t do anything …’

When Michael and I discussed it later, he said, ‘It’s about confidence. Something must have happened to Sophie two years ago that made her lose her confidence. Through her relationship with Darcy, she got it back again. Horses are powerful therapy.’

Secretly, I wondered if she had been talking to one or two friends all along and it was just with adults that she was silent? I never found out.

By the end of summer, Darcy was healthy enough to go out into a field with the other horses. First of all we tentatively let her out into a field with Tish, then as she got stronger, we introduced her to the other mares, and all went well. It meant that her close one-to-one relationship with Sophie changed, but she still cantered over to the fence whenever she saw Sophie nearby. Her eyes were bright and shiny, her coat glossy and there was no remaining sign of the poorly creature who had arrived in a trailer just a few weeks earlier.

Once she had started talking, Sophie never stopped. She chattered all day long about the horses, and became quite bossy with other children who hadn’t been coming to the farm as long as she had.

‘You don’t hold the brush like that,’ I overheard her saying as she supervised the grooming one day. ‘Do this.’ She demonstrated with perfect technique.

I never asked her why she hadn’t spoken for so long, never commented on the fact that she had started speaking again. I felt it wasn’t my business. I was just glad if coming to Greatwood had been the catalyst for her to get back to being a normal teenager again.

It gave Michael an idea, though. We knew of a couple of organisations that used horses to help adults with mental health issues. It seemed that they found fresh ways to look at life through their communication with animals, and many people turned the corner as a result. We didn’t have any experience of working with people with mental health issues, but we wondered if we could offer the same kind of experience that Sophie had on the farm. Children with problems could come along, get involved and see what they made of it.

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