My Animals and Other Family Page 16

  “She will be well looked after here at Aisholt, and we will ensure that she has a chance to regain the ground that she has . . . that she has lost, as it were.”

  She dropped her voice a notch and said conspiratorially to my mother, “We both know that all Clare needs is a slightly different group, as it were, around her, and she will flourish. I will make sure of it. Abssso-lutely sure of it.”

  As my mother thanked her for her thoughtfulness, Miss Houghton pushed her tongue into the gap between her teeth and lower lip to find a piece of potato. She chewed and swallowed as she pushed herself up from her high-backed armchair. She took her glasses off her nose, leaving them hanging from a chain on her chest. My mother and I leaped to our feet.

  “Thank you, Miss Houghton,” my mother said, behaving as if she too were coming back for Lent term.

  It was less than twenty years since my mother herself had been a pupil at Downe House—some of the teachers who had taught her were still there, so it must have been a bit weird.

  I kept my head bowed as I climbed the wooden staircase and crossed over the balcony to my new room. I was sharing with Henrietta Short, known as Shorty, a matter-of-fact girl who didn’t stand for any nonsense—or any snoring, as I found out on my first night, when she threw a shoe at me.

  We had a whispered conversation after lights out.

  “So, what happened?” Shorty asked.

  I told her the full story, right down to leaving the mechanical feet for Pickle to give the others in their Christmas whacky-bees. Shorty tutted. Then she sighed. Then she propped herself up on her elbow. I could see her outline in the half-light.

  “We’ve got some work to do, Clare.”

  “What do you mean?” I replied.

  “The thing is”—Shorty sounded a bit angry now—“that is not exactly the story that Snorter has been telling. She said that she gave you money to buy her some things at Foxgroves and that you stole the toys and then pocketed the money.”

  “She what?” I said. I was sitting bolt upright now. “But you can check the pocket-money book—she didn’t have any money left, that’s why I offered to pay for them, but she told me to steal them . . .”

  I stopped. I had broken my own code, but I was so outraged—not only had Snorter not told the truth, she had invented a whole new lie that made me look even worse.

  “Hmm,” said Shorty. “Well, that makes a bit more sense. I wondered why Miss Farr hadn’t expelled you. She must have seen it on the video footage. Did Snorter tell you to take them and then walk away?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, she did, but I didn’t tell Miss Farr any of this. I said it was all me on my own, all of it.”

  The next morning, another girl in Aisholt, called Antonia Kingsland (known as Toe) walked into breakfast with me.

  “You can sit with me, Balders,” she said.

  “Oh. Great. Thanks.” I followed her with relief, as walking into that dining room with every girl in the whole school looking at me was making me feel a bit sick.

  Toe’s mother was a science teacher at the school. I later found out that Miss Farr had briefed the teachers not to be hard on me and that Mrs. Kingsland had told her daughter to look out for me. Toe knew not to question her mother and just carried out her instructions.

  When the gang of Bear, Pickle and Snorter arrived, Shorty and Toe moved their chairs closer to me, acting as a human shield. They glared at the three girls, and Snorter blushed as she walked by. None of them acknowledged me, but I realized that I didn’t care. I no longer wanted to impress them, I just wanted to avoid them.

  It took time but, gradually, I felt a little more confident, a little stronger, and I threw myself into the things all girls do at school—mainly recording the Top 40 on Radio 1 on my cassette player, making sure to press Pause to cut out the inane chatter of Tony Blackburn and letting it go back into Record as the next song started. If you mistakenly got a bit of the chat, you went back, timed it and recorded blank noise to cover it, leaving a short gap before the next song. It was a tricky art, but one which I think I can say I mastered. I was the Top 40 recording queen.

  The chosen winter game at Downe House was lacrosse. We all wore gum shields, because too many girls had had their teeth knocked out and, in the age of orthodontic renaissance, that could be an expensive injury.

  I wasn’t the best lacrosse player on the planet, but I learned the art of contributing even when you didn’t have the ball, of trusting your teammates, of anticipating what might happen. I also found that regular exercise made me concentrate better in class and less angry at the injustice of my “situation.”

  We were allowed to watch television on weekends and the whole house gathered around the TV in the top common room. Char lay on her front as close to the screen as possible because she said she couldn’t see otherwise. I squashed on to a sofa with broken springs between Shorty and Toe, or with Heidi and Cass. Dynasty and Dallas were unmissable—we knew every character, every twist, every eyebrow-lift of Krystle Carrington or pout of Alexis Carrington Colby. The whole house hummed as the closing credits rolled, the more musical girls adding harmonies of their own.

  On the rare night that we were allowed to stay up late, I liked Cagney & Lacey, because it was the first time I had seen two female leads who weren’t at the forefront of a show just because they were “sexy.” I would play Cagney and Heidi played Lacey:

  “Ready, Christine?”

  “Ready, Mary Beth,” I would reply, before we charged around the corner of the corridor, imaginary guns at the ready.

  Each term, we changed our dorm room. Aisholt had lots of small rooms so, more often than not, just two girls would share. There were a few three-bed rooms and one four-bed room, known as Top Central, which was bang next to the main common room, where the TV was. Consequently, Top Central was only for girls in Upper Fifth, as they were always the last to have to put their lights out.

  As my confidence grew, I made proper friends—friends I still have today.

  ~

  In the second week of February that year—1983—Cass Donner came running into my room and turned on the radio.

  “You’ve got to listen to this,” she said.

  There was a reporter talking about a kidnapping in Ireland. The kidnap victim was not a child, it was a horse—Shergar. I remember sitting down on the bed, shocked. Why would they take a horse? How would they manage a stallion like Shergar? Would they hurt him? Who would pay the ransom?

  Shergar was never found. It is assumed that he was shot four days after he was taken, either because the kidnappers could not handle him or realized the ransom would not be paid.

  A month later, when I came home, I noticed security cameras in the top and bottom yards. There were cameras in four of the stalls as well, so my father could keep an eye on the most valuable horses. He had a small TV screen in the sitting room, which would flick between the various cameras all night long. The locks were all changed and the lads were given a lecture about security.

  Shergar was one of the few flat horses to which I had really paid any attention. Andrew always told me that I knew absolutely nothing about racing and, while he would stand alongside my father naming every horse and its breeding, I was really only interested in riding and jumping. I liked watching them run and I loved to see them work at home, but I wasn’t a form student, I didn’t know which races they should go for next and, once, at the kitchen table over breakfast, my brother mocked me mercilessly when I suggested a horse called Free Press, who had won his last three starts, might run in the Derby.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Andrew jumped down my throat, as my father laughed. “He’s a gelding and he’s four years old.”

  “So?” I said, hurt by his tone.

  “The Derby’s for three-year-old colts. Surely even you know that?”

  If anyone showed a tiny hole in their knowledge, the rest
of the family would sneer. It was like a constant game of Mastermind as they battled over handicap marks, race conditions, jockey statistics and ground preferences. Grandma would come over for a cup of coffee—standing, of course—and have the most incomprehensible conversation with my brother about the horses in the yard.

  She read the Sporting Life from cover to cover every morning. There was nothing she did not know about what was running where or how it ran yesterday or whether or not John Matthias, our stable jockey, had given it a decent ride. Often, in her opinion, he had not.

  I was a bit lost, so I opted out. The only thing that got me really excited was the Grand National. I adored it. Andrew and I got so worked up in the weeks leading up to Aintree that my mother decided we had “Grand National Fever” and took our temperature.

  On Grand National day itself, we turned the TV on at midday to make sure we caught each second of the Grandstand coverage on the BBC. I loved the features in the yards with horses looking relaxed and being allowed to show their character. I preferred jump racing to the flat because the horses stayed around for longer and I could get to know them better. I also thought the jockeys were unbelievably brave and I watched them seeing a stride at speed, wondering how they did it over fences as big as Becher’s Brook or the Chair.

  Every year, we picked two horses each and my mother phoned up to have bets for all of us. The horses selected by Andrew or me would also be “ridden” by us. This involved us both wearing our knitted sweaters in racing colors, our hats and our goggles. We sat on each arm of the sofa, a whip in hand, and rode “our horse” for the whole race. If he fell, we had to fall off the arm of the sofa, rolling around on the floor until we miraculously mounted our second-choice horse and rode a finish on him instead.

  The year 1983 was different because, for the first time, we actually went to Aintree. My father was in a spectacularly grumpy mood. This often happened during the winter, when he was on a permanent diet to be light enough to ride in point-to-points, but this particular year he had also decided to ride in the Fox Hunter’s Chase at Aintree.

  Dad had an outstanding point-to-pointer called Ross Poldark with whom he had run up a string of successes that winter at Tweseldown, Larkhill, Hackwood Park and Lockinge. Poldark was something of a superstar and Dad had decided, at the age of forty-five, that this was the horse who could fulfill his lifetime’s ambition.

  Despite all his success as a flat trainer, had he been given the choice, my father would have been a jump jockey. In his early twenties, he had been a decent amateur rider and had ridden in the Fox Hunter’s at Aintree twice, finishing fourth once and falling off the other time. Now, twenty years later, he had in Poldark a horse who could jump like a stag, gallop for up to three miles and was clever enough to negotiate the particular challenges of the Grand National course at Aintree.

  The Fox Hunter’s was restricted to amateur riders. If you were a professional jump jockey, you wanted to win the Grand National. For an amateur, the Fox Hunter’s was the ultimate prize.

  My father’s diet of fruit, no alcohol and Lean Cuisine ready-made meals had gone on many months longer than usual, to make sure that he was light enough to make the weight of twelve stone with a decent saddle. He went for runs wearing a polyester sweat suit, and even insisted on having a wooden sauna built into the bathroom that Andrew and I shared. He could lose four or five pounds, sometimes more, in a day, but would put it back on again as soon as he drank any liquid. He looked pale and drawn, and his temper was shorter than ever on the long drive to Liverpool.

  When we got there, Dad was in no mood to hang about.

  “Right, come on, you two, we’re going to walk the course.” He bustled off toward the wide, bright-green strip of grass beyond the white rails.

  Later I took in the covered winner’s enclosure and the old-fashioned weighing room that I had seen so often on the TV. But for now I was staggered at how flat the course was. I had been to Newbury, Sandown, Ascot and Cheltenham—all of which had contours of varying degrees, but this racecourse had been rolled out like a big grass pancake. On the inside of the racecourse was a smooth tarmac road. Mum told me that it used to be a Grand Prix circuit.

  The course we were examining was equally smooth, the lush green grass thick at the roots with plenty of “cover,” ensuring that even if there was no rain and the ground was good to firm, the cushion of grass would dispel the concussion effect on a horse’s hooves.

  The Fox Hunter’s is run over two miles, five furlongs—just over one circuit of the Grand National course. It starts at the top of the straight with the Chair as the third fence, the water as the fourth and then past the Grand National start to the line of fences that includes Becher’s Brook.

  I could not believe how big the fences were, all of them at least four feet six inches high, with the Chair standing at a whopping five feet two, with a ditch on the take-off side giving it a width of eleven feet. They looked so much bigger up close than they ever had on the TV, but my father kept telling us that they used to be even more frightening.

  “See all this spruce on top?” he said, picking up bits of the greenery. “It never used to be this thick. And all this padding at the front? They used to be just straight up, with no apron on the front, nothing to help a horse stand off. Just like vertical walls, they were.”

  He placed his right foot on the lower part of the fence, where it stuck out like a swollen belly, and pressed up and down.

  “Much better now.”

  I have no idea whether my father was saying all this to make himself feel better or to make us less nervous but, as we came to Becher’s Brook, I had a rush of genuine fear. The hedge on either side of it always let you know that the runners were approaching the most fearsome fence on the course, and I knew from watching on TV that the horses galloped toward the fence so fast that it became a blur.

  So far, my father had been walking on the inside of the course but, as we approached Becher’s Brook, he started to angle off the inside toward the middle. He walked right up to the fence. It was as big as he was. He patted the spruce on top.

  “Go round to the other side,” he instructed.

  Andrew and I ran around to the landing side of Becher’s Brook, from where we could barely see my father’s head above the mound of green.

  “Walk along that landing side and tell me what you see.”

  “There’s a big ditch,” I said, staring at the murky water running through it. That’ll be the Brook, I thought, where Captain Becher got a dunking in 1839.

  “It’s got a bigger drop here,” said my brother, who had walked right across to the inside rail. “You don’t want to land here.”

  He pointed to the ground, where the turf clearly sloped back toward the ditch. Even if a horse jumped it well, it would be caught out by the camber and crumple to the ground.

  “That’s why I will jump it right in the middle,” Dad said, coming around to join us on the landing side.

  My mother, who had said little thus far, marked a line on the fence and said, “Jump it here or wider, Ian. No farther in than this.” She said nothing else to my father the whole way around.

  Dad talked us through the angle he would take at the Canal Turn, where the field has to swing through ninety degrees sharp left, how he would “take a pull” as they crossed the Melling Road back on to the racecourse proper so that Poldark could fill his lungs with air, ready for the final two fences, and how he would jump the last upside the leader but not ride a finish until he reached the elbow. There was still about a furlong to the winning post from there and, as we knew from watching Crisp get caught by Red Rum in 1973, it was a long, long way on a tiring horse.

  Dad started to jog up the home straight, and we ran with him, all three of us racing to the line. Dad still wouldn’t let us win a race unless we had earned it, so he dipped for the line to make sure of victory.

  The next day, my m
other kept Andrew and me out of the way as Dad studied the other runners in the Sporting Life, making sure he knew which ones jumped well and which ones to avoid getting stuck behind. We were worse than an irrelevance—we were a hindrance.

  It was my first insight into the psychology and utter self-absorption of the committed athlete. It doesn’t really matter whether you are an amateur, doing it for the love of it, or a professional earning money from sport, you are either completely committed or you’re not.

  We watched from the grandstand, the white-sheepskin noseband making it easy to pick out Ross Poldark and my father. They made most of the running, jumping Becher’s Brook exactly on the line my mother had marked. Dad sat back on landing, then gathered up his reins—he always told me that learning to slip the reins through your hands and then take them up again was one of the most important riding skills—and they galloped on toward the Foinavon fence together. He saw the line he wanted to take at the Canal Turn and stuck to it. As the field crossed the Melling Road, I could see Dad trying to give Poldark a breather, but there were three other horses going just as well as him.

  Andrew and I started to shout, “Come on, Dad, keep going,” as he jumped the last two fences, but the writing was on the wall and although he got around, Poldark could only finish fourth. It was the same placing as my father had attained twenty years earlier on a horse called Christmas Robin. At least that meant they got to come back under the roof of the winner’s enclosure. Andrew and I cheered, Liz was beaming as she led in Poldark and my mother allowed herself to breathe again. Dad was the only one who didn’t look happy. Fourth was not good enough.

  Had he been younger and not a full-time flat trainer, I suspect my father would have had many more attempts at winning the Fox Hunter’s. As it was, he tried once more and was unseated at Becher’s Brook, jumping too close to the inside. He didn’t pay any attention to my mother advising him to stop, but he did finally listen when his owners pointed out that they were paying good money to have him train their horses and it would be preferable if he wasn’t trying to kill himself at Aintree every spring.