Maple – my lovely Maple, always the most sensitive of horses – trotted nervously on the spot, snorting with anxiety. Maple knew that this tiny rider was reluctant to sit on her back. She could feel it in her blood and bones. My mother aborted the attempt, placing Marlon gently on the grass, pushing back his oversized riding hat so she could wipe his eyes.

‘There’s something wrong with that bloody horse today,’ my father was saying as I reached them. Uncle Jack was down on his knees examining one of Maple’s rear hooves with a tool that looked like a cross between a small hammer and a miniature pickaxe – a nailing hammer, is what we call it in the riding world, used for the healthy maintenance of your horse’s hooves. If you want to dig out a stone that is trapped between hoof and horseshoe, or remove a bent nail, or fix a loose shoe, you use a nailing hammer.

Uncle Jack held up a tiny pebble for my father’s examination.

‘That could be the problem,’ Uncle Jack said. ‘Old Maple might not be so skittish now.’

‘It’s not Maple’s fault,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t want to do it, Dad.’

I picked up Marlon and held him tight, his snotty little nose pressed against my shoulder. I shook my head at my father.

‘Dad, Marlon doesn’t want to ride a horse,’ I said, pulling off the brand-new riding hat and handing it to my mother. ‘And you can’t make him.’

‘Your father’s not making him!’ my mother said angrily, always ludicrously quick to leap to my father’s defence.

Marlon sighed against my neck, his breath warm. He buried his face deep into my shoulder. After his hectic morning of almost horse-riding, he seemed suddenly ready to fall asleep.

‘We all ride in this family!’ my father said, red-faced with frustration, making it sound like an order, and I thought he was going to reminisce about coming from a long line of stable lads in the old country, bejeebers. But he did not have the heart for it today.

‘He can’t sit inside all the time,’ he said, ‘just looking at a book.’

I held out my hand for Maple’s reins and Uncle Jack passed them to me, the nailing hammer hanging limp by his side.

‘I know you’re trying to be kind,’ I said to my dad, because I saw that he was not angry or frustrated, not really. He was hurt.

This was meant to be a big day, a happy day, the day that Marlon fell in love with horses the way I had, a love that would last a lifetime, and it had all gone wrong. ‘I know you want Marlon to love riding the way you did and the way I did,’ I said. ‘But maybe it’s not his thing.’

My dad laughed shortly, as if he had never heard such an outrageous suggestion, and he turned back to the house, my mother soon catching him up.