Alice Hayes on nerve:
“No lady can enjoy riding, or become proficient in that art, unless she has good nerve. … Luckily, the large majority of girls who learn to ride possess abundance of nerve and pluck, an excess of which is often a danger to safety in the hunting field. … It is the custom to laugh at people who are suffering from temporary loss of nerve, but it is heartless to do so, as we have all, I believe, felt, more or less, what Jorrocks would term ‘kivered all over with the creeps,’ at some period or other of our lives. … It may, however, be consoling to ladies who are battling against loss of nerve, to hear that I have known brilliant horsemen lose their nerve so utterly that they were unable to take their horses out of a walk.”
This post relates to a chapter of the book If Wishes Were Horses: A Memoir of an Equine Obsession. If you have any questions to ask about the content, please fire away in the comments. The main online index for the book is here.