My Animals and Other Family Page 18

  One morning, I rode up through Smith’s Bushes, intent on schooling Stuart over the hunter-trial fences. When I got to the top of the Downs and Stuart was fully warmed up, I reached down to tighten the girths a notch. One of them snapped in half, so I took off the saddle and left it on the fence. Stuart was a wide-backed horse and pretty comfortable, and I had done plenty of bareback riding at Pony Club camp. We didn’t need a saddle.

  We jumped ten or fifteen fences up through the fields and, although I can see why saddles were invented, riding bareback is a superb way of really feeling what your horse is doing and of improving your own balance. As we cantered back through the paddocks (trotting was not an option—far too uncomfortable), I saw Jonna who, having climbed out of his red tractor, was inspecting my saddle.

  “Or’right, Miss B?” he said, chewing a long piece of grass. “Broke yer tack, ’ave you?”

  “I did, Jonna, yes. But I didn’t want to disappoint Stuart by not letting him jump!”

  “Di’nt wanna disappoint yer’self, more like!” he replied. “I never saw a girl so into jumping as you, Miss B. Just like yer pa. Now, d’yer want me to take this saddle back fer yer?”

  “That would be most kind. Thank you, Jonna.”

  Jonna would always keep an eye out for me, especially when I was teaching a young horse to jump. He never once told my parents if I’d been doing something I shouldn’t.

  His face was battered by the elements, his clothes always stained by grass and sheep dung, his gait a little arthritic as he plodded up and down the gallops, treading in the divots made by the horses. But he had an innate peace that many of us spend our lives trying to attain.

  One morning when the stubble was cut and the hedges had all been trimmed, I decided to take Stuart down to the end of Long Meadow. We did a bit of flat schooling, we popped over every size of straw bale and then I took him to have a look at the big hedge that ran down the side of the bales.

  I don’t know to this day what possessed me, but I felt an urgent need to jump that hedge. It was huge—as big as Becher’s Brook—and I was on my own, a mile away from the yard. I was not out drag hunting, when your blood is up and you go with the crowd, jumping fences you’d never consider in cold blood.

  I let Stuart have a good look at the landing side then took him around the other side, where the stubble field would let us have a slightly downhill run at the hedge. I had to pick my spot carefully so that the landing would be safe and I wouldn’t frighten him unfairly. Then I cantered him around in a circle, collected him up into a short, bouncy stride so that he could get power from his quarters, and cantered toward the hedge. I kept my legs strong and, when my brain started to doubt the sense of what we were doing, I tried not to let it transmit to my body.

  Stuart took off. He sailed over that hedge and landed effortlessly on the other side. A horse who wouldn’t jump a post and rails of two feet six with my father had just jumped a hedge which I later measured at five feet two inches high. I reached down and hugged him, kissing the side of his neck. What a saint.

  Stuart was so eager to please and, with a bit of help from our French assistant trainer, Erwan Charpy, he became pretty good at dressage as well as cross-country. Erwan had grown up being taught the French skills of equitation, and he was a fine horseman. I watched his lower leg—so strong and steady as Stuart lengthened into an extended trot or smoothly transitioned from walk into canter.

  “You see, Clare, it’s all about confidence,” Erwan shouted at me, as I sat on the fence watching him go around in circles on Stuart. “’E must feel that you are confident in what you are doing. Keep your leg on; ’e will give.”

  Stuart was black with sweat, every ounce of him making the effort to give Erwan what he wanted. When he did something right, there was a pat and a murmur in French that Stuart seemed to understand; when he did something wrong, a patient repetition of the command until he understood what was being asked of him.

  I watched Erwan carefully, his face etched with concentration. He was thinking like a horse, talking to Stuart all the time, and underneath him the timid, fearful young horse was growing in stature and self-belief.

  “You take this horse. ’E now thinks ’e is a better horse, because I have made ’im feel that way. Life, you see,” said Erwan, “it is all—’ow you say?—a con trick.”

  “Really?” I replied.

  “I mean ‘con’ as in ‘confidence.’ The more confident you are, the more people will believe in you; and the more they believe in you, the more confident you will actually become.”

  At Downe House, I tried to put into practice what I had learned from Erwan. Be confident, and others will be confident in you. Be consistent. Be fair and be honest. I had a lot of ground to make up, but it helped if I wasn’t always trying to impress people.

  13.

  Henry

  Occasionally, you come across a horse with no natural sense of self-preservation, a loose cannon, a nutter. Meet Henry.

  Mum and I went to try him at Wylye near Salisbury. We were on the estate owned by Lord and Lady Hugh Russell, where the British event team used to train before major competitions. Lady Hugh Russell would spray paint spots on cross-country fences at the exact point she wished them to be jumped and bark from her electric cart at any rider who strayed left or right.

  Henry was almost black, with a paler brown muzzle, dark-brown eyes and the smallest trace of a white star in the center of his face. His ears curved into sharp points, like Mr. Spock. His coat was smooth and shiny like a racehorse, his body so fine compared to that of Quirk or Stuart, and he was alert to everything going on around him, reacting to any sound or sight.

  With all this space around, it surprised me that I was trying Henry in an indoor school. He had a short, bouncy canter and needed plenty of restraint, but he jumped brilliantly. I asked if I could take him outside for a gallop.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t do that,” said the girl who was selling him. She paused, and then said rapidly, “The sheep are being moved today, and we’re not allowed on the cross-country course. It’s best we stay in here.”

  Mum and I looked at each other, and I shrugged. I was dreadful at buying horses, because I liked them all. Even if they were difficult, I was convinced I could improve them; and if they were affectionate, I was hooked. My mother was more savvy but, in this instance, both of us were hoodwinked. Not just for saying yes, we’d take Henry, but for failing to add the condition of a week’s trial at home.

  He was fine in an indoor school or in a field with a fence around it, but when Henry saw open spaces there was no stopping him. There were racehorses trained by my father that couldn’t keep pace with Henry in full flight. And full flight was what you got if you wanted to canter in a straight line. Around and around in circles—he would do that nicely; but across a field or up the Far Hedge—that would be full pelt.

  I foolishly thought that, if I pointed him at some decent-sized fences, he would have to slow down. Henry thought otherwise. We once covered a cross-country course at Tweseldown so fast that the fence judge at the water didn’t even see us arriving before we were through the other side. Henry was not a horse my mother, or anyone else, wanted to ride.

  I saw him as a challenge and rode him at Hickstead in the Downe House show-jumping team for the school championships. We entered that arena in trot and, as I halted and saluted the judges, it hit me that I was riding in the same arena as show-jumping legends like Eddie Macken and Harvey Smith, jumping the same jumps as Nick Skelton.

  The Hickstead arena is the biggest in the world. As I asked Henry to move from halt straight into a fiery but controlled canter, it felt as if we were on a cross-country course rather than in a show-jumping arena. I kept him turning so that he wouldn’t realize how big a space it was. As I heard the bell, I circled around and through the timing beam that ran across the start.

  Henry flew over the oxer, the planks a
nd the white gate. He shortened up for the double and stretched again for a big parallel. He gathered pace as he came to the last—a brown upright with panels rather than rails—and it took all my strength to contain him. He rattled the center post where I had aimed him, but the panels stayed put. Henry had jumped a clear round, and at the home of British show-jumping, and as I took my hand off the reins to acknowledge the applause, he zoomed forward as if I’d pressed a booster button. He took off at 100 mph around the outside of the ring. I tried to pretend I had intended an impromptu lap of honor while I struggled to get him back under control.

  Our Downe House team, which included Daisy Dick (later a top-class international eventer), finished third and I won an award for “Best Style” from Dougie Bunn, who owned Hickstead. He had clearly been fooled by the lap of honor.

  We tried a variety of bits on Henry—the solid ones, like a Pelham and a Kimblewick; the jointed ones, like a Dr. Bristol and a Waterford; the various types of gag—American and Balding—that lowered his head as well as restrained him. None of them worked. Henry was officially uncontrollable. His competing was restricted to cross-country courses with lots of turns or just dressage and show-jumping. He certainly couldn’t go out drag hunting or team chasing, which rather spoiled my fun.

  I enjoyed my holidays, because I could ride two or three horses a day, and I was never bored, but other girls at school seemed less enamoured of their time at home.

  “Oh ya, we went to the south of France and it was really dull.”

  Or: “Daddy had a yacht on the Med this summer, but he had to keep going back to work so it was just me and my stepmother. A bit, you know . . . boring.”

  Their holidays had been a whirl of beaches, parties and shopping. I envied the glamorous lifestyle and couldn’t understand why they never seemed to have enjoyed it much. During the winter, my parents had decided—rather late in life—to take up skiing.

  My father’s approach to skiing was the same as his approach to everything. He went as fast as he could and was afraid of nothing. Style was not something that bothered him, which was lucky, as he had none at all. He was like a demented cowboy tearing down the slopes, turning once in a while straight across the path of an unsuspecting skier, wiping out children at will, and falling often. He once tumbled the whole way from the top of a black run to the bottom, losing both skis and one boot on the way.

  “I did it,” he said as he picked himself up at the bottom, brushing the snow from his pants, his arms and his face. He was smiling, and his eyes looked glazed. Andrew and I didn’t have the heart to point out that falling down a black run did not mean that you had skied it.

  My mother was more cautious. Her main objective was to avoid my father. The best way of doing this was to ski on a different mountain.

  Family skiing holidays gave me something to share with the other girls when I returned for the Michaelmas term, although most of them went in the spring, when it was much warmer and the snow was softer. Dad, of course, was busy in the spring, so we went in January when it was freezing and the snow was icy. Not that I’m complaining, just explaining how Andrew and I got frostbite on a T-bar in Zermatt.

  I had grown used to feeling as if I wanted to vomit as my mother drove me through Thatcham toward Cold Ash at the start of each term. Sometimes I thought I was going to faint and maybe, hopefully, I would end up in the hospital and wouldn’t have to go back to school at all. I can’t remember exactly when I stopped feeling sick and actually started feeling excited at the beginning of term, but it must have been around the end of my Lower V/start of Upper V year.

  I was playing lacrosse regularly and, because I was younger than my classmates I could play under-fourteens when the rest of the year were under-fifteens, and so on. It meant that I was the senior player on the team, instead of being the most junior in my own year. I worked hard on trying to read the game, intercepting the ball or stopping an opponent from making an attacking move. I practiced my cradling and got much better at picking up a loose ball from the ground. My fitness improved. The team were bonded by sweat, effort and mutual honor. That worked as a pretty good glue.

  My mother came to watch whenever she could. She whistled at me from the sidelines so that I knew she was there. Whenever Andrew or I were in a crowd, my mother didn’t shout, she whistled, as she did for the dogs. It was a two-note whistle, like a wolf whistle in reverse. My father wasn’t interested. He didn’t understand lacrosse.

  “No boundaries?” he said, when I tried to explain. “How the hell do you control the game if there are no boundaries? You mean you can run right into the crowd?”

  “Well,” I said, reasonably, “the referee would probably blow the whistle if you did that but, yes, you can go behind the crowd or behind the goal if you want. It’s a really good game, Dad. You have to come.”

  He made a noise like a kettle when it’s boiling.

  “Sounds stupid,” he said. “Anyway, I don’t like women’s sport-.”

  I persisted. “But you’ve only been to my school once, and you were really embarrassing. You told my Latin teacher she had good legs. So, don’t do that again, but you have to come to a match. Please.”

  “I’ll come when you’re in the first team.”

  I did eventually make the first team but I only played in three matches. In the third, I twisted my leg, ripping the cartilage and pulling the ligaments in my left knee. I hobbled off the field and was driven back to the main school by Miss Farr, who sent me up to the San—the school hospital on the second floor of Tedworth. Sister prescribed ice packs and a heavy dose of painkillers, but it was still agony when I went home for the Short Exeat.

  I tried to ride. It hurt when I got on, it felt sore in walk and, as I tried to trot Henry up the main avenue, the pain was excruciating. I turned around and went back to the stud in tears.

  “I can’t ride,” I said. For me, this was akin to saying, “I can’t breathe.”

  My confidence was shattered. If I couldn’t ride—if I could never ride again—what would I do? What would I be any good at? What would I say to myself when things were going wrong?

  I had surgery in Oxford and spent the next month on crutches. I wasn’t allowed to ride for eight weeks. My first-team career was over, and Dad never did see me play lacrosse.

  So it was that I headed toward my sixteenth birthday on crutches and, thanks to orthodontic work, metal tracks on my top and bottom teeth and a head brace to wear at night: how to make a girl feel special. Despite the clear sign on my face that spelled out “Do not kiss” in metal, a boy had actually kissed me at the school ball. Well, he was either kissing me or trying to eat me—it was hard to tell—but he was sweet, and we exchanged letters for months. We never saw each other again, of course, but I liked the way he wrote the name “Hugo.”

  For years, every other girl had opened Valentine’s cards—probably sent by their parents in the name of the hamster—but my pigeon- hole was empty.

  “Commercial claptrap. Just an excuse to make you buy cards” was my mother’s attitude.

  When I got my first Valentine’s card in writing that looked like Hugo’s, I felt that I was finally on track. I was one of the team, just like everyone else. I ignored the nagging doubts in my head and concentrated on the relief that I was fitting in at last.

  The school ball was a huge success for our year. Everyone “got off” with someone, and some girls were virtually engaged by the end of the night. On the minus side, quite a lot of girls got caught smoking—half our year had to come back the following weekend to pick chewing gum off the bottoms of chairs and tables. It took them two days. I did not get caught smoking, because I did not smoke. I say this for my father’s benefit, as he insisted that my taffeta dress of red, purple and green smelled of smoke. This was because Hugo had been smoking, but I couldn’t tell him that so I just said, “It wasn’t me.”

  “Don’t lie to me, Clare. I c
an smell smoke. I know you’ve been smoking and, given your track record, I do not feel inclined to believe you just because you tell me you haven’t.”

  My father had given up smoking at the age of twelve. He told me this as if it was quite normal. His parents, like everyone else in the 1940s, kept wooden boxes of cigarettes around the house, to which guests or family members helped themselves. So Dad helped himself from the age of six to twelve, when he decided smoking ten Philip Morris full-tar cigarettes a day made him feel sick. He spent the following decades lecturing everyone else on the ills of smoking from the position of being a convert. In this instance, I was innocent, but try telling that to a born-again nonsmoker with a penchant for delivering lectures.

  ~

  Dad, once he’d got the smoking thing out of his head, promised me that, when I was sixteen, I could ride in my first point-to-point. This was assuming that I would be able to ride again and that my knee would take the pressure of having my stirrups short, as jockeys had to. It also assumed that I wanted to ride in a point-to-point. I knew my father’s idea of fun—tying a sled to the back of a truck and flinging two young children about in the snow, flying headlong down a black run with no skis on and riding around Aintree. He said point-to-point riding was the biggest thrill in the world but, on the evidence I had, this wasn’t a great recommendation.

  When I came off crutches and started to walk again, my father told me that I needed to lose weight. My mother had been making the odd comment about clothes looking tight, but my father just said it outright.

  “You’ll need to ride at eleven stone with a saddle in a point-to-point,” he told me, “which should be fine, but I want you to have a really decent saddle, and you need to be fit. Much fitter than you are now. You’ve got very porky. Lose it.”