Free Whispering Back by Adam Goodfellow Page A

go’, but as I watched a fellow student become only the second ever person to sit on the first youngster, a three-year-old thoroughbred called Candide, I felt no sense of being left out. It was as fascinating to watch as it was to do, and I was sure we’d all have a chance. Walking back to the car park, however, I realised with some surprise that not everyone felt the same way. I could hear mutterings of ‘It’s not fair’ and ‘Why were those students chosen?’ I closed my ears to the negative words, but they were like pinpricks threatening to burst the balloon of my happiness.
    On the third afternoon, I caught a glimpse of the frustration that can result from wanting to impress. One of the students, Janet, was working with Magic, one of the other youngsters, and she was doing a good job, following Monty’s instructions carefully, but not always moving at the right pace or in exactly the right direction. As it was Magic’s third time in the round pen, he was getting more familiar with the process, and was finding the student’s occasional small mistake somewhat confusing. Tension was creeping into Monty’s voice, and he was clearly worried about undoing the progress made in the first two sessions. To prevent any further confusion, he stepped into the pen, and took over that part of the join-up process. For those of us watching, it was immensely valuable – we could really see the difference in what Monty was doing. For Janet, though, it was a disappointing moment. She watched carefully as Monty demonstrated what he had been trying to explain, and then she took over for the rest of the session. I thought she’d coped with the situation brilliantly, and was very impressed with her resilience.
    As it happened, she and I ended up driving back to the college in the same car with the student, Anna, who had worked on the horse the day before. Janet was giving herself a hard time over the mistakes she’d made. I tried to reassure her without offending Anna.
    ‘Well, from where I was sitting, it didn’t look as if you made any more mistakes than Anna did – sorry, Anna. It’s just that because it was the horse’s third time, it was even more critical not to confuse him. If you’d done the horse yesterday, and Anna had done him today, I’m sure the outcome would’ve been the same.’
    Although Anna agreed wholeheartedly, we couldn’t shake Janet’s persistent feeling that she’d somehow failed. I could really identify with this feeling, particularly given my reticence to get behind the wheel of Kelly’s car, but it occurred to me in a sudden flash of insight, that the whole point of receiving help and guidance was to have your mistakes exposed. If you managed to conceal them, you would never get the information you needed to correct them. I was reminded of one of my most absurd Cambridge experiences: I was struggling with an exercise paper on Thermodynamics, and although the answers were printed on the back, it was taking me about four hours per question to arrive at the correct answer. And even when I’d finally contorted my calculations so that I came to the right conclusions, I was never able to remember the process of how I’d got there. Yet, rather than explaining my difficulty to the tutor, I spent an hour trying to convince him that I understood it, when in reality, it had made no sense to me at all. Janet wasn’t much cheered when I recounted this experience, especially when I told her how dismally I’d done in the exams at the end of my first year, before giving up Engineering. But from that moment on, I resolved that I would never try to cover up my inadequacies when I was receiving instruction with a horse, and I would never again pretend to understand something I didn’t.
    At the end of the first week of the course, Monty did the last few dates of his ‘book launch’ tour, a series of demonstrations to promote his work and his book. When Kelly told us that we were welcome to come along to