I would have been barely ten or eleven when we met. Her name was Ally and she had big brown eyes, thick black hair and a reputation for being moody. It was the classic beginning to any love story: wariness, even dislike on my part, indifference on hers.
Except that my first love was not a person, but a pony.
I always belonged to that particular tribe of little girls, the ones who love ponies, and Ally was one of the 20 or so horses at the riding school where I had weekly lessons. Small and dark with a diamond of white hair between her eyes and little white socks on her hind legs, she was unpopular, prone to clocking an unsuspecting kneecap with a sharp hoof. And so I regarded her, half with fear, half with disdain, at least at first.
Then, one hot afternoon, begrudgingly assigned to ride Ally in a lesson, I tried something new. Rather than gripping tightly at the reins, fearful at what she would do next, I relaxed and gave her a little slack. By the end of the hour, she was transformed. It was like the moment when Elizabeth Bennett finally falls for Mr Darcy, had they been a prepubescent girl and a grumpy little pony respectively.
Alas, ours was to be a tragic tale. Inevitably, I grew too tall for Ally, petite as she was, and not long after I outgrew ponies altogether, transferring my affections to the middle Hanson brother and, later, my first boyfriend. He broke up with me six months after we met, declaring he couldn’t marry his first girlfriend. I wasn’t quite thirteen.
There have been other romances since, one of them lasting, but few of them have taught me half as much as that pony – about perseverance, about give and take, and, not least, that often what you’re looking for can be found in the most unlikely of places.
