LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

many times, and even at the age of six I was already plotting and scheming as I had it in the back of my mind that one day we would return to reclaim what I saw as our inheritance.

      At Slades Farm my mother and her two sisters had been brought up with horses, dogs, cows, pigs and chickens. When I did not grow out of the desire to bolt with terror every time I saw a dog – something that neither of my parents could understand – my mother, the psychologist, reasoned that putting me on a horse would overcome my fear of animals. And it did so almost instantly. What she did not reckon with, though, was that she ended up with something far worse than her small son bolting in a sweaty frenzy from a dog. With my new-found obsession with horses I lost interest in all things my parents valued, like schoolwork, the arts, reading and socially acceptable behaviour. But my fixation was not the romantic pony club schoolgirl type; it was a near-fatal mixture of love, hate and fear.

      Long after I had stopped riding, in early 2009 a condition known as Equine Addiction Syndrome was coined by Professor David Nutt, the former drugs adviser to the Labour government of Gordon Brown. Equasy, as he named it, was responsible for at least ten deaths a year. According to his research, an addiction to riding horses was statistically far more dangerous than taking ecstasy or smoking cannabis. His rationale was that for every 350 exposures to the horse there was one serious adverse affect or injury, whereas for every 10,000 exposures to ecstasy there was only one adverse incident. His argument was simple: horse riding is more addictive and, indeed, more dangerous than taking Class A drugs. It was the same Professor Nutt who, also in 2009, raised the spectre that alcohol and tobacco were more dangerous than ecstasy. He was promptly sacked by a government that didn’t like what it was hearing.

      Although it took me years to articulate it fully, being put on that first pony, aged six, planted a seed that grew into an addiction the older I got and the worse the situation became at home. The musty, oaty smell of the beast and the heat that rose off it after exercise became entwined as a powerful symbol of all that I could trust and feel safe around while living a family life that was gradually getting worse with every passing year. There was a helplessness but also a fear of this animal that could, if it needed to, become ferocious. The anxiety many children show around horses is not cowardice; it is the same as that of the person who cannot swim and who has to jump into the sea so as to learn how to swim in case they ever get into serious difficulties. They may be nervous but they have to learn. That was how it was with me and ponies. But as I got to ride more often, so my confidence grew and I was relating more to horses than to home life, the family, school and people around me. But the problem I had was that we lived in London, not in the countryside, and it only became worse the older I got, and I was stuck with living out my dream watching horse racing on television.

      Showjumping on the BBC was a favourite, and in 1970 I watched my first Grand National on television, sitting right up against the screen as though I might actually be able to climb into the paddock if I concentrated hard enough. Later, in 1971, watching Mill Reef winning the Epsom Derby was the first piece of real equine drama I witnessed, and the most exciting thing I had ever watched on television. The seventies were the heyday of British racing, and the country seemed to stop work weeks before the Derby, enthralled by the drama of the build-up. There were front-page headlines almost every day, and that year all the talk was of the little wonder horse called Mill Reef and his rich American owner, the banking heir Paul Mellon.

      The television news reports called that year’s race one of the finest Derbys ever run, and I watched it slumped in front of the television in a smoke-filled drawing room, staying with my mother’s former neighbours at Gospel Ash Farm in Somerset. I was in horse heaven. Tiny Mill Reef, at barely fifteen hands, devoured the lush turf beneath his feet, flying over the ground before him, his rivals flailing helplessly in his slipstream. My heart pounded as I willed him to win. Away from my parents and surrounded by people who were just as fixated by the little horse as I was, I had never felt more at home. This was where I belonged.

      After the race I went off with Victoria Gibbs to tack up her skewbald pony, Nugget. Even though it was mid-June, Nugget was covered in mud, having found a place out of sight in which to wallow and roll. The pair of us worked for hours scrubbing his coat, picking out his feet, sponging out his nostrils and eyes. I put his bridle on and he threw his head in the air as I tried to get the bit to connect with his mouth, but I was only nine and quite short so every time he wanted to avoid the bridle he just lifted his head up in the air, knowing that I wouldn’t be able to reach, even on tiptoes. He blew out his stomach as we tried to tighten the girth straps. Victoria and I trotted off down the flint-strewn track and I worried about Nugget’s feet; he had no shoes on and was uncomfortable, often darting onto the grass verge where it was softer underfoot. When we got back my hands, pullover and jeans reeked of Nugget.

      Riding Nugget during the holidays, I was happy beyond anything I had ever experienced. At the end of the summer we would return to London and that irresistible waxy smell would fade from my clothes as we drove east towards London along the A303. I was not enamoured by the prospect of the drudgery of London life and the world that I inhabited, as a suburban child, with no horses in a stable outside the back door. I knew, like a person who feels he is in another body, that I was growing up in a wrong place. If I had been born a generation earlier I would have grown up with the animals on the farm, horses, hunting and racing. As soon as we got home I shut my bedroom door and lay in bed longing for the day that we could return to the farm and I could get back in the saddle.

      * * *

      Chiswick Comprehensive School was in the same league as Holland Park Comprehensive. A former grammar school, it was staffed half with old-school grammar school teachers and half with right-on lefties. I started there in 1972, aged eleven, with children of other parents who also should have known better, among them the sons and daughters of politicians, academics, doctors, lawyers, film stars and businessmen. I hated every minute of it. The problem was that all the children were guinea pigs and the parents were indulging themselves in a socialist experiment that for a lot of us turned out to be a complete disaster. My mother told me years later that the comprehensive system was a ‘brave new hope’ that was embraced by all right-thinking parents.

      The teaching was truly appalling but the politics of the time dictated that the system and the school would work perfectly. No one, least of all the parents, was looking at what was going on and I ran riot at every opportunity. I was constantly being caught smoking, bunking off to go and ride and very often just not bothering to turn up at all. Following my dad’s diagnosis, my behaviour spiralled out of control. I couldn’t and wouldn’t concentrate in the classroom. Homework was abandoned amid great tantrums, and it took very little for me to start playing up as I moved listlessly from one term to the next, only just avoiding being expelled.

      Locked in my bedroom as punishment for yet another misdemeanour, I wrote stories about horses and executed very bad paintings of them, too. It seemed that it was only when I was in the company of horses that I calmed down, and I took every chance I could to return to the stables in Harefield where my pony, Bracken, was kept at livery. The only one who put his finger on the personal issues I had was our physical education teacher, Mr Reynolds, a tall, athletic man who loved his job. He once said to my class that there was only one boy, in his opinion, who would ever be as passionate about what he did in later life as he was. He knew I was flailing around at school, but he could see that I had a passion I couldn’t yet fully articulate and he had faith that I would eventually come good. It was a strange moment: I knew that out of all those children sitting in front of him in that class I gave him the most grief, and yet he chose to praise me above all of them. There were others who were not so kind: the French teacher, Mr Bumford, who one day for no apparent reason came and stood on my fingers as they were splayed on the floor behind me. Even my classmates were shocked.

      Everything changed when, aged twelve, I met Emma. One year above me, Emma Burge was small and blonde and, like me, horse-mad. We started bunking off school together, went riding, smoked Silk Cut Blues. I tried to sell an Oxo cube dyed with green ink as a lump of hashish to some of our friends. And almost every minute that we were together was spent talking about ponies.

      My first entrepreneurial foray was not a great success and I had to return all the money we’d earned when the deception was uncovered, but Emma gave life at school a new dimension. Her parents had

Скачать книгу