My Animals and Other Family Read online

  Her brother William stood with her outside the church door. She looked to him for comfort as he took her hand to lead her down the aisle. The best he could offer was “Your hands are sweaty.”

  So Ian and Emma, my parents, were married in the summer of 1969. They honeymooned in Cornwall, at a house belonging to a friend of Dad’s. They couldn’t be away for long because the flat season was in full swing and my father was busy. They stayed for four nights and then they were back to the hectic life of Kingsclere and the glare of my grandmother.

  My father gave my mother a horse called Milo as a wedding present. It was a re-gift, really, as Dad had been given him and continued to ride him. By 1970, he’d clearly forgotten that he had gifted him to my mother at all, as he rode him in his own colors and listed himself as “owner” for the whole point-to-point season.

  My mother’s life ran to the clock of her new husband. His work was important and all-consuming. The horses were divided into two “lots” of around thirty horses each. One was exercised before breakfast, the other after. My father got up before six, rode Milo out with First Lot and then went to Park House for breakfast with my grandmother, his assistant trainer and Geoff Lewis, the stable jockey. Then he rode out a different horse with Second Lot and went to the office to plan the entries, speak to the owners, pay the bills and sign the checks for the staff wages.

  There was racing from Monday to Saturday. On Sundays, he played cricket in the summer and rugby in the winter. Or my mother drove the horse trailer to Tweseldown or Larkhill or Hackwood Park so that my father could ride Milo in a point-to-point.

  His life was frantic, but my mother was lonely. She needed company. So she trawled the ads in the Horse & Hound, the Telegraph and the Sporting Life. Eventually, the Newbury Weekly News came up trumps:

  Boxer Puppies for Sale

  3 BITCHES, 2 DOGS

  Already weaned. Ready for new home.

  Phone Paul on 0703 556218

  Mum and her younger brother Simon drove down to Southampton to see the litter of puppies. Paul opened the door wearing a tight white blouse, an A-line skirt, a silk scarf tied in a bow around his neck and full makeup.

  “Come in, come in,” he said as he ushered them through the door. “Now, sit down, the both of you. My, what a handsome couple you make. Cup of tea?”

  Uncle Simon blustered and flustered, “We’re not, we’re not . . . It’s not like that. She’s my sister,” not sure where to look.

  Paul shimmied into the kitchen to flick on the kettle.

  “So, my lovelies, what do you know about boxers? Do you realize how much work they take, how much exercise they need, how they will take over your life?”

  He made tea, and for half an hour he told them every detail about the behavior of boxers. He grilled my mother about the house, where the dog would sleep, how often it would be exercised and what sort of lifestyle it was entering into. My mother was tested further on her suitability to be a dog owner than she had been to be a wife. Forced to think about it more deeply, she knew that this was what she wanted.

  When finally allowed to see the litter of puppies, she was captivated. One of the red-and-white bitches was playing with her brothers when my mother knelt down beside the pen. Paul and Uncle Simon stood back to let the bonding process begin. The puppy looked up at my mother and wiggled her hips. Mum leaned down to pick her up, and the puppy seemed to smile. She licked my mother’s face and then pressed her velvet head into the soft part of my mother’s neck, just below her jawline.

  My mother smiled and a tear formed at the corner of her eye.

  “Hello, you,” she whispered. “Where have you been?”

  Uncle Simon uttered his first words in an hour. “We’d like to take that one, please. If it’s not an imposition. If we can, that is.”

  Paul had watched my mother and understood. She had been a bit stranded, floating on a raft not of her own making.

  “Of course. She’s weaned, she’s had her injections and she’s good to go.”

  Candy sat by Uncle Simon’s feet in the passenger seat of the car. He was wearing open-toed sandals, which was how he realized, as they passed Winchester, that she had peed on his foot. It was the only thing she ever did wrong.

  Boxers are such fun to be around. Forever playful, fiercely loyal and always affectionate, they will demand a full part in family life. Mum said that if we grew up thinking that boxers were beautiful, then the whole world would be a beautiful place. She was right.

  ~

  I arrived about six months after Candy, in January 1971. My father was not present at the birth. It was not the done thing.

  I spotted early on that the dogs got lots of attention so worked out that it would be best to be a dog. I crawled to drink from the water bowl—I mean, who doesn’t do that? I stopped short of sharing their food, because I was a fussy eater.

  During my early years, Candy was queen of our castle and she took her responsibilities seriously. When a photographer came to take an official black and white photo of “the new baby,” he asked my mother to find something for me to play with. I was lying on my front on a rug on the lawn. Candy watched my mother disappear and silently moved in next to me, just to make sure the man with the camera didn’t whisk me away. The best photos are of Candy and me together.

  Later that day, Mum shut Candy and Bertie, the lurcher, in the house and headed off down the steep drive with me in the stroller. She was wearing a new coat, which changed her outline from behind. She heard a noise and, when she turned around, she saw a slightly wonky-looking boxer trotting down the drive, barking a low, gruff warning alarm.

  “Candy, what are you doing here?” she said.

  Candy looked a bit dazed, as well she might. She had clearly thought that I was being abducted, so she’d thrown herself out of a top-floor window.

  She had tried the back door, the front door and all the windows on the ground floor but found them locked. So she’d run up the stairs and discovered one window that was slightly ajar. Pushing hard, she had squeezed through the gap and jumped the twenty feet down to the ground. Her job was to protect me, and protect me she damn well would.

  She suffered only a mild concussion and recovered quickly.

  When Candy was nine years old, my parents took a rare holiday. My mother was persuaded, against her better judgment, to send her and Bertie to a kennel. What happened is still a mystery but it seems that Candy had a heart attack. She died before my mother returned.

  Mum has never since sent a dog to a kennel. It wasn’t the kennel’s fault, she knows that, but she still frets that Candy must have felt abandoned and confused, that she wouldn’t have known she was being left there only for a fortnight, that she must have panicked and weakened her heart with anxiety.

  2.

  Mill Reef

  The year was 1971. Specify beat Black Secret by a neck to win the Grand National under a jockey called John Cook, wearing the colors of Fred Pontin, the owner of Pontin’s holiday camps.

  I do this, I’m afraid. Mark my years by Grand National or Derby winners. Sometimes I do it by Olympics—give me a year and I’ll tell you where the Olympics were held, but that only works every four years, so Grand Nationals and Derbies are more precise.

  In 1971, the Derby winner was a little horse called Mill Reef. He was one of the true greats. He’s still talked about as one of the best Derby winners ever. He’s also the only Derby winner I’ve ridden—well, sat on. But there’s a photo to prove it and everything. I’m wearing red cords, blue Wellington boots, a blue sweater and a red balaclava. I am a vision in red and blue.

  I’m leaning forward like a jockey but there’s no saddle. I’m turning to the camera and smiling. I have a light grip on the reins and no one is holding me.

  Hang on a minute . . . no one is holding me and no one is holding him. What the hell is going on here? I’m barely eig
hteen months old, I’m on a four-year-old colt who the year before had won the Derby, the Eclipse, the King George and the Arc, and earlier that year had won the Coronation Cup. Alone. There isn’t an adult in sight.

  He could have bolted, I could have lost my balance and smashed my skull on the floor. Just one step sideways and I’d have been a mess. Clearly that mattered little to the people around the great horse—that is, my parents.

  My dad cries when he talks about Mill Reef, because he knows he owes that brave little bay horse everything. I once met a man who bought his first house with the money he won on Mill Reef in the Derby. My father never put a penny on him and yet could claim to have won his career and lifestyle because of him.

  Ask my father what happened in 1971 and he’ll tell you how disappointed he was when Mill Reef was beaten by Brigadier Gerard in the 2000 Guineas, how easy he was to train, how he had a serenity and inner confidence, how when he first saw him gallop it was like watching a ballerina float across the stage: his hooves barely touched the ground before they sprang up into the next stride. He was neat, compact—some might say small—but he was nimble, agile and fast.

  Strong fitness training for racehorses, when they gallop fast in pairs or threes, is called “work.” It happens twice a week—at Kingsclere, where my father trained, the horses walk for twenty minutes up to the Downs on a Wednesday and a Saturday, and that’s where they do their serious work.

  Some horses work moderately and improve on a racecourse; others show it all at home and are disappointing on race day. Mill Reef was so good at home that he needed one horse to lead him for the first half of the gallop and another one to jump in halfway to stay with him to the end. No horse was good enough to stay with him for the whole length of the gallop. When he got on a racecourse, he was even better.

  Dad will tell you how he got stuck in traffic on the way to Epsom and had to run the last two miles to make sure he was in time to put the saddle on Mill Reef for the Derby. He might admit that he had a funny feeling that Mill Reef was going to win the greatest flat race of all, but even he didn’t know that this wonderful horse would do it so easily.

  What he will forget to tell you, if you ask him what else happened in 1971, is that I was born.

  ~

  No one was prepared to rush my grandmother out of her home, so she took her time. When she was ready, Grandma built a new house across the road and painted it pink. We called it “The Pink Palace.” There she would reign for a further fifty years.

  The rooms at Park House were used as living quarters for the stable staff, and it acquired an air of faded glory. Now in a new house not far away, my mother was removed from the workings of the yard, and a safe distance away from Grandma, but she was also disconnected from her husband, who worked every day of the week.

  My mother might see him if he popped in to change, but often he jumped in the shower, pulled on a suit and dashed off to the races. He would come back in time for evening stables and then, finally, some time after seven, he would arrive at the house with a large board that looked like a ladder of narrow slats. “The Slate” was sacrosanct.

  Into each horizontal runner on the board, he would slide the name of a stable lad, and either side of it the name of a horse. The horse to the left of the name would be his ride for First Lot and the name to the right of it the one he would ride out Second Lot. The names of horses and lads were printed with a Dymo Maxi printing gun. It had a wheel with letters on it that would imprint in white on to colored plastic tape. The horses were color-coded according to their age, and the human names were all in blue.

  It took a fair amount of planning, and on Wednesdays and Saturdays there was “work” to be sorted out. My father did not like to be interrupted while he made his lists on paper with his all-color Biro: black for the date and for the horses’ names; blue for the riders and their weight; green for the gallop to be used, the distance to be covered and the instructions; red for the comments (written afterward) on how they had worked.

  In the summer of 1972, Dad had planned a strong, bowling canter for Mill Reef on the Seven Gallop (so named because it was seven furlongs in length). Not a full piece of work—he wasn’t ready for that—but a gallop fast enough to ascertain how well he was and how much fitness work he would need before he could run again. John Hallum, who always rode him at home, was on board and set off behind Merry Slipper, who was going as fast as he could. Mill Reef—or Jimmy, as John called him—was swinging along in his usual fluid way.

  It was and still is quite rare for a Derby winner to be kept in training as a four-year-old, but Paul Mellon, the American philanthropist who owned him, believed that racing was about being a good sport. The latest Derby winner is the headline horse—he can earn millions in his first season at stud. The risk of keeping him in training is that he may not improve or, even worse, he might deteriorate and therefore devalue his earning potential as a stallion.

  In this case, the gamble of keeping Mill Reef in training had turned out well—he had won a Group 1 race in France that spring by ten lengths and the Coronation Cup in a tight finish at Epsom in June. Dad was worried about the way he’d struggled in that race and got the vets to check him over. He was found to be suffering from “the virus.” He was sick.

  “The virus,” as all trainers call it, is an unspecified illness that can sweep through a yard, affecting all the horses to a greater or lesser degree. How it is caused is a mystery, and even stranger is how it suddenly disappears. The symptoms are hard to spot because the horses are generally fine at home. They work well, they eat up, they look healthy in their skin but, when it comes to racing, they run out of puff at the crucial stage and abruptly look as if they are treading water. Most ordinary horses finish nearer last than first when they have the virus. Mill Reef still managed to win, but he wasn’t right.

  So he was given time over the summer to recover, and this gallop in late August was part of his preparation for another tilt at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris on the first Sunday of October. It’s the most stylish, glamorous occasion in the racing calendar. I have presented the Arc on television many times and I love it—as a sporting event, as a fashion parade and as a reminder that the French do things with such, as they would say, élan.

  When Mill Reef careered away with the Arc in 1971, he was the first British-trained winner since 1948 and, if he could retain it, he would be the only British-trained horse ever to win back-to-back Arcs. It was with this elusive challenge in mind that Mill Reef was winging his way up the Seven Gallop early that morning.

  My father was sitting on a horse farther up the gradual incline so that he could watch the final, fastest two furlongs and assess the fitness of his star. The heat was not yet in the sun. It was a bright day, the grass slightly browned by the summer months. My father loved the view from up there. He could look north from the height of the Downs, right across Berkshire and Hampshire, as far as Reading, sixteen miles away. He loved it there. He was a lucky, lucky man.

  That bubble was about to burst and, for the first time in his life, neither his luck nor his charm would save him.

  He heard the distant pounding of hooves. Mill Reef and his lead horse, Merry Slipper, came thundering by, their nostrils flaring, their coats gleaming like polished mahogany in the early-morning sun. John Hallum was crouched over Jimmy’s neck, his soft peaked cap turned backward so that it didn’t blow off in the wind, his reins tight, holding the horse together as he lengthened his stride and quickened his pace. He was moving well, looking good and, with a satisfied smile, my father turned to watch the next pair coming up the gallop.

  As he followed that second pair with his eyes, sweeping his gaze from right to left, he noticed something strange. The first pair of horses were not at the top of the gallop as they should be, gently pulling up to a trot and turning to walk back along the track. Instead, one of them was standing to the side of the gallop, with only three legs on the grou
nd. It was—oh God, he thought, it couldn’t be—it was Mill Reef.

  John Hallum was holding him, trying to keep him calm as the other racehorses galloped past.

  Dad’s heart stopped. He started shouting at the work riders coming up the gallop, “Pull up! Pull up!”

  He then turned and cantered with dread toward John and Mill Reef.

  “I heard a crack, Guv’nor. It’s not good,” said John, his quiet voice faltering.

  The horse, whose galloping motion was so smooth and so easy, had suddenly shuddered. John had realized in an instant that something was badly wrong and pulled on the reins immediately to stop Mill Reef doing further damage to himself.

  John, the man who loved and cherished this horse even more than my father did, was cradling Mill Reef’s head into his chest to stop him moving, stroking his face and whispering into his ear, “It’ll be all right, Jimmy. It’ll be all right.”

  Mill Reef had fractured the cannon bone between the knee and the ankle of his front left leg. He was holding it above the ground, a look of confusion in his eyes, pain searing through his body.

  Most racehorses will not stand still when they are hurting—they thrash, they bite and they try to gallop away from the thing that is causing them pain, injuring themselves further in the process. Mill Reef stood still. John kept whispering in his ear, telling him that the pain would stop soon, that he was a champion, that it would be all right.

  Both John and my father knew that it would not be all right. They knew Mill Reef would never race again.