Wild Life

4 October 2008

Horse Cure

His nervous breakdown was in full swing. He said his head was ‘going round and round’. Worst of all, he had incurable insomnia. Raised by nannies, he went for little walks. He did not like farms. But Dad assigned him to a team of labourers constructing a new livestock dip on the Ngare Nanyuki river. It was several miles walk just to get there. Laurie worked alongside the workers through the heat of the day, and then walked several miles home. He turned lobster red.

He still suffered. My aunt Beryl came to stay, fresh from living in a cave in Petra where she had been painting. She got him sketching, but he still was not right. My father liked horses and already had a stable full of them. One day, on a whim, he purchased from a neighbour a wild black stallion called Rocky. There was nowhere to put Rocky, and with lions about Dad led him down to the rondavel and tethered him to the centre pole. Laurie was doubly horrified. He feared animals. Rocky whinnied and stamped all night. Now the insomniac had a good reason not to sleep. ‘I thought Brian was cruel,’ remembers my mother.

As the days passed like this — labouring and walking in the heat of the day, Rocky stamping all night — Laurie began to improve. He still complained of insomnia, but my parents often checked on him to find him in a deep slumber. While asleep, it seems, he dreamed he was awake.

After some weeks, he became cured. He returned to Aden, but later suffered another relapse and came to stay again. By this time the farmstead was all built, so there was no need to put him in with Rocky. Instead, he was sent for electric-shock treatment at a hospital in Dodoma, which was as effective as the Horse Cure but even more alarming for Laurie. When he was finally better that time, Laurie departed and my parents never heard from him again — except that he sent the gift of an ornately carved Mogul chest, which became a treasured possession.

So this is what I do to kill my hack’s depressions: go to the farm, switch off the phone, dip cattle, dose sheep, weed vegetables, chew fat with shepherds, walk in the heat. Then sleep. Horse Cure.