I've always believed in heaven. Ever since I was six, which is when the Virgin Mary first appeared to me and enveloped
me in her tenderness, writes MICHAEL HARDING

A TEENAGER arrived at the front door in an old Toyota and announced that he was looking for land.

“My brother has two mares,” he said, “and he’s looking to put them on grass.” I asked him were they piebalds, because I’m fond of those beasts, ever since I first saw Tonto and the Lone Ranger on a neighbour’s black and white television set one wet Saturday afternoon, when I was a child. I didn’t quite understand what exactly Tonto and the Lone Ranger did, apart from gallop about in the snowy television world, but I loved Tonto’s horse.

Unfortunately I had no land to offer the boy at the door, who looked gaunt and desperate, and I shuddered to think what his horses might look like after a winter perishing in the snow, and being fed buckets of slop from the kitchen in some tiny back yard.

The boy sounded desperate.

“Please,” he said, “you must help me brother. He really loves his horses; he loves them horses even more than his car, and he drives a Subaru.” The General happened to be in the dining room, enjoying a glass of wine at the time and he came rushing to the door and said that he would be happy to take the horses onto his land. He gave the young lad directions to where he lived, and the boy went off, delighted with himself, and we went back to dinner, content that some poor horse was about to discover a little bit of heaven.

I’ve always believed in heaven. Ever since I was six, and decided to climb trees instead of watching the Lone Ranger, which is when the Virgin Mary first appeared to me, and enveloped me in her tenderness.

I had gone up the main trunk of a chestnut tree, and sat on its lateral branches all afternoon, thinking myself equal to any monkey, when Arthur, my best friend, started pretending he was another monkey at the base of the tree. There was a dead spruce tree lying against the beech, which afforded me a path of escape, as the other monkey came up the tree towards me. But the spruce was rotten, and as I scampered down, the branches gave way beneath me, like the shells of a thousand eggs, and I fell on my head and damaged my back. I lay on the floor of the wood, in awe of gravity, and terrified of my mother, whom I knew would scold me severely for climbing trees.

But that thought was swiftly replaced by serenity as I looked at the sky. I think it was the branches whipping my back as I fell that put eggshells in my mind, and the blue of the sky that suggested the Queen of Heaven. My back may have been lacerated by the branches, but inside, I felt like a bird fallen from its nest, and was certain of a mother’s immanent presence, not scolding me, but rather enfolding me in her arms, and reassuring me that I was okay.

I didn’t see anything as literal as the porcelain Virgin commonly associated with Catholic apparitions in my moment of ecstasy; it was more a vague feeling of security, and later in life a Jungian analyst explained that it was my own Unconscious that fabricated a heavenly mother out of the woozy blue.

I confessed all this to the General, when I went around to view the new horses. He was in the stable mucking out, and fussing over his favourite mare.

“The foaling season will soon be upon us,” he said, as he wiped the flank of a horse that fell last spring and suffered terrible injuries, and that everyone thought would never survive. But the General minded her, and now she stood before me, plump and in foal, her eyes bulging with the wonder of being a mother once again.

We headed for the field, out past a stable from where a skeletal pony eyed us nervously. “I rescued that one from a field where two other ponies lay dead,” the General said. “The poor creature’s back was scorched with rain.” While we watched her, she circled her bucket, terrified that we might take her food away.

And finally, as we approached the field, two frisky piebald mares, belonging to someone who drives a Subaru, gawked at us over the gate, and the General said, “Now look at that! Are they not in heaven?” And I said, “They surely are.”