My Animals and Other Family Read online

  My brother arrived in December 1972, the year that Lester Piggott won the Derby for the sixth time on Roberto. My father was at a party at the Argentine Embassy the night my mother gave birth, but the next day he picked up his wife and their son to bring them home. Grandma was at The Lynches with a bottle of champagne. She kissed my father and patted my mother on the shoulder.

  “Good girl. Well done. That’ll be that then,” she said, looking at my father with a silent signal that two children were quite enough now they had one of each. The fact that she herself had gone on to have two more boys after the allotted “one of each” was quietly ignored.

  Andrew was a calm baby. He didn’t go in for tantrums, crying fits or sleepless nights. He was good in all the ways in which I had been bad. He had a sweet nature and he loved his food, gobbling up everything that was within reach.

  I wasn’t much interested in him as he couldn’t really do anything, and yet he seemed to get so much attention. It was strange.

  ~

  During the winter, Valkyrie had been to visit a Shetland pony stallion called Cornelius. They seemed to like each other and, eight months later, she was even fatter than usual.

  “There’s a baby growing inside her,” my mother explained.

  I thought it odd that a baby like Andrew could be growing inside Valkyrie, but figured that, if my mother said it was true, it must be.

  Eleven months after her date with Cornelius, Valkyrie gave birth to Parsifal, known as Percy (the Wagner connection passed me by). Percy slipped out smoothly in the middle of the night and, by the morning, he was standing on the tiniest legs I had ever seen, feeding from Valkyrie’s swollen teats. He was lighter than her in color, with a reddish hue to his main body and a darker mane. Mum said he would be “bay.”

  Percy’s nose, in the concave space between his mouth and his cheekbone, was the softest thing I had ever felt. I scratched the front of his face and looked him square in the eye.

  “Percy, you are going to be my brother’s pony. I think you will be a good boy and he will love you.”

  The last part of that was true. Andrew did love him, but Percy was as far from being “a good boy” as it was possible for a pony to be. Where his mother was warmth and sunshine, Percy was darkly evil. He bit, he kicked and, just as you’d got him into a nice bumpy canter, he loved to jam on the brakes and try to roll. If you hadn’t already fallen off, the only suitable exit was to jump off before you found yourself squashed underneath him.

  Percy looked as if butter wouldn’t melt, but he was a little bastard. Andrew spent most of his early years being bullied by a pony no taller than a large dog. It must have been humiliating. On the plus side, he fell off a lot. My father had told us that to be proper jockeys, we had to fall off a hundred times. We took our father at his word and, as we were both keen to impress him and desperately wanted to be “proper jockeys,” we set our minds on the challenge ahead. Andrew and I worked out that to get up to a hundred falls, we would have to commit ourselves fully to the project. Ten falls a day seemed too many, but five was manageable and off we went. Or, to be more accurate, off we came.

  “That’s one more. I’m going to be a proper jockey!”

  Our mother was always in charge of our riding, but she did not understand why we were gleefully falling off so often. Dad had not been allowed out alone with either one of us since the one and only time he had been told to “mind Clare gets home safely.” He had handed Valkyrie over to Billy, one of the young boys working in the yard, smacked my pony on the backside and watched as we trotted off. I was barely two and a half. We headed out across the Starting Gate field, back in the direction of The Lynches. Billy was in a hurry. He didn’t much like being given the task of child minding, and did not realize that I was bumping along, hanging on for dear life.

  I held on for as long as I could but, as we gathered speed, I couldn’t keep it up. I fell off. It took Billy a full furlong before he realized I wasn’t there. When he turned to look, I was in a crumpled heap in the middle of the field. I didn’t cry immediately, mainly because I was in shock, but when the tears came they came thick and fast.

  “Come on now, don’t you be making a fuss,” Billy said. “Up you get, straight back on. That’s what happens when you have a fall. Got to get back in the saddle. Straight away.”

  I cried all the way home as he held me in place. My mother took one look at my face, which had turned quite pale, and knew it must be serious. She sent Billy on his way, seething with anger that my father had been so irresponsible. She whipped the tack off Valkyrie, turned her out in the paddock with the shortest, least succulent grass and carried me into the house.

  I was still in pain and couldn’t move my shoulder, so she left a note for my father:

  Make your own lunch. Gone to hospital with Clare.

  P.S. You are a bloody idiot.

  My parents had a friend who was a doctor at Basingstoke Hospital Accident & Emergency. We would come to know him well. He X-rayed my shoulder.

  “I’m afraid it’s broken,” Dr. Elvin explained to my mother. “Collarbone. Should take a couple of weeks to mend. Can’t do much more than try to control the pain, and I’d advise you, Emma, not to let the children anywhere near Ian.”

  The good news was twofold. My bones were so soft that the break mended quickly, and Dad’s other rule was that “to be a proper jockey, you have to break your collarbone.” I had already done it and I hadn’t even turned three. This was a serious head start. Dad took until he was over fifty-five to break his collarbone and, by that age, it really hurt and took ages to mend.

  ~

  It was 1976, the year of the long, hot summer. An Italian jockey called Gianfranco Dettori, father of Frankie, won the 2000 Guineas on Wollow. Andrew and I decided we wanted to be cowboys or, more specifically, rodeo riders. I had a full cowboy outfit but decided that, for the purposes of authenticity, Andrew should borrow it and try out the rodeo riding. I had noticed that there were no female rodeo riders and, therefore, it had to be him.

  Even at the age of five, I would certainly not have turned down the opportunity of doing something just because girls weren’t meant to do it. No, I wanted Andrew to go first for a good reason.

  We had worked out that what made the rodeo horses buck was a “flank strap,” a piece of leather tied under and around their flanks and touching the sensitive skin at the top of their hind legs. We duly found something that would do the trick and tied it around Valkyrie so that Andrew could reach back and pull on the strap and it would tickle her under her tummy and cause her to buck.

  Well, Valkyrie had always been the mildest-mannered old lady in the world. Trying this on Percy would have been suicidal. But Valkyrie would look out for us. Putting her head down for grass was about her only vice. Or so we thought.

  Good Lord, we had no idea what a mean and moody mare lay underneath that calm exterior. Andrew walked over in his chaps, plastic gun in holster and red neckerchief in place. He pulled down the tip of his cowboy hat and said, in quite a good American accent, “I’m a rockin’ rodeo rider!”

  I helped him get on and led Valkyrie out into the field behind the house. I stood back and shouted, “Hold on to your hats, folks, because here in the stadium for you tonight we have Cowboy Andrew and his bucking bronco Vixen. It’s rodeo time . . .”

  Andrew reached behind him and pulled the flank strap. Valkyrie, aka Vixen, went berserk. Totally and utterly bonkers. She galloped from one end of the field to the other, bucking with every stride. Andrew started screaming. His face was bright red. He was terrified. For all the falls we had practiced taking, nothing quite prepared him for this, and I don’t know whether it was a bailout or a falloff, but it was a relief to see him hit the deck.

  We caught Valkyrie and took off the flank strap as quickly as we could. We led her quietly back to the stables and, when Mum asked why Andrew looked as if he had been c
rying, he said, “Clare hit me.”

  I didn’t argue. It was better than the truth, and Mum was so used to it being the reason for his tears, she didn’t question us further.

  We decided not to tell the Queen about the rodeo incident.

  Andrew’s most spectacular fall came when we were galloping full pelt up the straight four-furlong wood chip strip that was used for the racehorses. It was a rare treat to be allowed on it, and we were doing our best impressions of Willie Carson (Andrew’s favorite jockey). Suddenly Percy stopped and Andrew, in the midst of head-down Carson-like pumping, carried on. He ended up face first in the wood chip. Percy had dived off sideways onto the grass and was merrily munching his way to a broader girth.

  I was laughing, as I thought Andrew had done it on purpose. He hadn’t. I was keeping count of his score and told him that he was up to number fifty-six. He didn’t respond. His round face looked up, covered in brown bits of wood. He was crying. He was bruised and battered, but he hadn’t broken anything. Not this time.

  My mother got fed up with us falling off before we even got into the sixties and told Dad that he had to do something.

  “It doesn’t count if you’re falling off on purpose,” he said, in his important voice.

  “What?” we responded together.

  “Sorry, but it’s not the same. Falling off is something that happens by mistake, not by design. You can’t just go round falling off all the time. It’s dangerous, and your mother doesn’t like it.”

  “Oh,” we said.

  It was rather disappointing—all that effort and none of it counted.

  However, it did teach both of us not to be afraid of falling. It’s funny how not being scared of something means that you no longer try to fight it and, in not fighting it, you find it doesn’t control you.

  Dad inadvertently taught us not to avoid doing something because we might fall or fail. Do it, enjoy it and, if you fall, so what? You’ll get straight back on again.

  4.

  Bertie

  They say a person’s choice of dog reflects their personality. Some dogs, all too clearly, look like their owners—or owners can grow to look like their dogs. My favorite image from Crufts was a tall, sleek woman with long hair running alongside her Afghan hound, his ears falling up and down against his face as her hair did the same. They fell into the same rhythm, with blond locks flowing, lolloping across the arena in perfect symmetry.

  My mother had her boxer. She was warm, protective and slightly smelly. Candy, that is, not my mother.

  My father? Well, he had a lurcher. A proud, dismissive and vicious killing machine called Bertie.

  Dad, with his jet-black hair and olive skin, always used to tell us that he was a potpourri of different bloodlines. He said he had Gypsy blood through his great-grandfather, a horse dealer in Leicestershire, and we had no reason to disbelieve him. Dad could never have lived in London or worked in an office. For one thing, he is always slightly too loud and too obvious with his observations on other people.

  “Honestly, why on earth would you let yourself get like that?” he will say in a stage whisper about anyone who carries an ounce of excess flesh. This is not helpful in a crowd.

  He hates to be inside and, if he could, he would spend all day out in the elements—he’s not much interested in talking to people. Animals, however, fascinate him. There is something intuitive about the way he is around horses that makes me believe he has Gypsy blood. I certainly think that his ancestors lived and worked with horses and dogs.

  Dad’s father, Gerald Balding, had spent his childhood on the backs of various ponies and horses, improving them so that they could be sold by his father for a profit. His Uncle Billy had taught him and his brothers to play polo. They rode long, with one hand on the reins, turning their ponies by placing the reins on the side of the neck. The ponies and the boys learned fast as they galloped around the big field in Leicestershire, hitting a ball with a mallet.

  Billy Balding taught them to be decisive and strong, to “ride off” each other, to take their line and commit to it, to be forceful with players but sensitive with their ponies, never yanking them in the mouth or exhausting them. They would hop from one pony to another, the skill of fast interchanges being as valuable as hitting the ball accurately.

  In polo, there is a handicap system so that really good players can form a team with overweight, rich businessmen and make them feel as if they are contributing something. The best player is rated 10 and effectively makes his team start at –10 goals, while the worst player is rated +2 so his team starts with a 2-goal advantage. The handicaps of the four team members are added up to create a team handicap, and teams of similar ability will be pitted against each other.

  Gerald Balding became a ten-goal player. The Gerald Balding Cup is still played at Cirencester Park in his memory and, to date, no British player has matched his ability.

  In the 1920s and ’30s, he made the most of a golden age for polo—a thundering, fast sport that married danger and excitement with wealth and privilege. With a stroke of good fortune that would later be mirrored by his son, Gerald met and befriended an American multimillionaire who became his patron. Jock Whitney was a friend of Fred Astaire, was at times romantically linked with Tallulah Bankhead and Joan Crawford, had inherited $20 million from his father and was mad for horses.

  Whitney owned Easter Hero, the Cheltenham Gold Cup winner of 1929 and ’30 who was also runner-up in the Grand National. Somewhere along the line—family history does not relate when or where—Whitney discovered Gerald Balding’s talent for polo so asked him out to New Jersey to help instruct the socially ambitious, wealthy young men who were taking up the game in droves.

  Gerald encouraged his brothers Barney and Ivor to follow him to a land where they would not be limited by lack of money or social connections. They were single, handsome Englishmen with good manners and a way with horses. As far as the New Jersey set was concerned, the Balding brothers were the most eligible new bachelors in town.

  There is a photo of the three of them leaning on their polo sticks, all with slicked-back coal-colored hair, wearing pantaloon-type breeches with black leather boots and short-sleeved shirts. They looked like movie stars. They played at the Meadow Brook Club on Long Island, cheered on by pretty, well-connected young women. Special trains from New York would arrive with thousands of spectators. They were living the Great Gatsby lifestyle, and yet they had inherited nothing, apart from exceptional ability on a horse.

  Gerald spent the spring and summer months managing and playing for Jock Whitney’s Greentree team. In the late autumn, he headed out to India, where he played polo for the Maharajah of Jaipur, who himself was a ten-goal player.

  Gerald represented England in the Westchester Cup, the big polo match against the USA, in 1930, ’36 and ’39. Along the way, he married an American called Eleanor Hoagland and, by the time he headed off for the Second World War, he had seen the birth of his eldest son, Toby, in 1936, and my father, Ian, in 1938. When he returned from the war, he and his family moved to England, where he started to train racehorses, with Jock Whitney as his major owner.

  ~

  Many of our dogs and horses were given family names. Dad’s first lurcher was called Billy, after his great-uncle Billy who had taught his father how to play polo. Bertie was named after his grandfather, Albert. Bertie was the color of August wheat, with a smooth, velvety head and a broken, rough body of hair. His eyes were pale brown, his nose aquiline and his knobbly tail had wisps of hair hanging down from it. I thought he was a domesticated lion, and I was wary of him. He was not warm and cuddly like Candy. He would raise his lip if I came too close when he was in bed. He didn’t actually bite me, but he would snap at the air to make sure I knew it was his space.

  He liked my father, and when Dad walked into the room he would be delirious with joy. He wagged that thin, bony tail so ferociously that
it smashed against the furniture and split. Even if you like Jackson Pollock, you probably don’t want a bloody imitation of his art on your kitchen walls. Consequently, Bertie spent many weeks with his tail tip taped up.

  The word “lurcher” comes from a word in Romany, “lur,” meaning “thief” and, my God, Bertie had that bit nailed. If you so much as glanced out of the window while eating, he would whip a potato off your plate, slinking away before you had even noticed.

  Once, during Royal Ascot, when my parents had important owners staying, my mother had laid out the starter for a dinner party. It was Parma ham and melon. Mum thought she would get ahead of the game so that she could enjoy predinner drinks with the guests but, by the time they came into the dining room, there was just melon. Each and every piece of Parma ham had been delicately and thoroughly removed. There was not a shred of evidence left, to the point that my mother genuinely thought she had forgotten to put the ham out.

  Bertie was in his bed, pretending to be asleep, one eye half open to survey any potential fallout. I wouldn’t have put it past him to have planted half a piece of ham in Candy’s bed while she snored, so that she got the blame.

  A lurcher is a mixture of a sight hound, usually a greyhound, with a type of terrier or pastoral dog. They were invented in Norman times to get around some daft law that said that only the gentry could own smart, majestic breeds like the wolfhound or deerhound. Commoners were effectively forbidden from owning a sight hound, in case they used them to poach game.

  Well, the commoners came up with something even better: the speed and eagle-eyed vision of the greyhound or whippet with the brains of a Bedlington terrier or a collie is a lethal combination. They are hunters by nature, with the ability to run, turn, jump fences, catch and kill their prey silently. They will also retrieve, bringing a hare or a rabbit back from miles away. They are stealthy, cunning and ruthless.