Bestselling author Michael Korda's Horse People is the story -- sometimes hilariously funny, sometimes sad and moving, always shrewdly observed -- of a lifetime love affair with horses, and of the bonds that have linked humans with horses for more than ten thousand years. It is filled with intimate portraits of the kind of people, rich or poor, Eastern or Western, famous or humble, whose lives continue to revolve around the horse.
Korda is a terrific storyteller, and his book is intensely personal and seductive, a joy for everyone who loves horses. Even those who have never ridden will be happy to saddle up and follow him through the world of horses, horse people, and the riding life.
The Statistical Abstract of the United States, a bottomless compendiumof useless facts, indicates that there are over 5 millionhouseholds owning a horse or horses in America today, andthat the total horse population is, give or take a few horses,about 13.5 million.
That seems like a lot of horses in a country where most people hadalready made the switch to the automobile by the end of World War I,and in which horses -- with a few exceptions like police horses, or carriagehorses in places like New York's Central Park, or among theAmish -- are no longer working animals, strictly speaking.
When I was a boy in England, the milkman had a horse that not onlypulled his milk wagon but knew enough to stop at every house to whichhe delivered milk on his route, and fresh fruits and vegetables werehawked from horse-drawn carts, but all of that is long since gone. Evenon cattle ranches, the horses are more ornamental and traditional thanuseful these days.
At the same time, horses aren't exactly pets, like dogs and cats. Forone thing, they don't live in the house, or even visit it. However domesticated the horse is, he's not part of domestic life; his place remains firmlyoutside, in the field, the corral, the paddock, or the stable, depending onthe part of the country you live in. You go to visit the horse, the horsedoesn't visit you. In other cultures -- among the Mongols, for example -- horsemen sleep with their horses, for warmth, one presumes, but thathas never been the Anglo-Saxon way, even among old-time cowboys.However fond the rider may be of his mount, it's our custom to beddown at some distance from it. Little girls may fantasize about sleepingwith their ponies, but not many actually do it, which is just as well, sincehorses of all sizes are restless sleepers, and very likely to kick out whendisturbed. In any case, horses do most of their sleeping standing up.
So the horse occupies a peculiar and privileged position, not quite apet, no longer a working animal, rooted, for many people, in the past,but flourishing in the present, admired even by people who don't ride,and apt not only to survive but to thrive almost anywhere.
A few words about my own involvement with horses. I came to horsesearly in life -- somewhere there is a picture of me on a small, shaggypony at the age of about six -- but although I learned to ride, living as we did in Hampstead, on the outskirts of London, we never owned ahorse.
My father Vincent and his two brothers, Zoltan, a few years older,and Alexander, the eldest, had grown up in rural Hungary before theinvention of the motor car, so horses were neither a mystery to themnor an enthusiasm. Their father, Henry, a man with a fierce militarybearing and mustache but with curiously melancholy eyes, had been acavalry sergeant during his military service before he became the over-seerof the immense estate of the Salgo family on the Hungarian puszta,or plains, and certainly he rode a horse to go about his job. Of his children,neither Alex nor my father rode as adults, though both had beenon horses as children, if only to take them back and forth from the fieldsto the stable. When World War I began, however, my uncle Zoltan wascalled up for military service and actually became a lieutenant in a cavalryregiment in the Austro-Hungarian Army, unusual for a Jew in thosedays, particularly in the army whose most famous veteran was the titlecharacter in Jaroslav Hasek's classic novel The Good Soldier Svejk. Zoli sawcombat on the Galician front and was wounded, gassed, and taken prisonerby the Russians. He rode in at least one cavalry charge, and perhapsas a result, in later years he showed no desire to mount a horseagain. Uncle Alex's eyes were bad...
