LITMIR.BIZ

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a fiery upstart called Fred, and a donkey called Jasper. Turned onto his back and held down by local farm-hands, Jasper used to have his ever-growing feet clipped so that he could walk comfortably. At weekends we would go down and visit and Emma would drive Jasper and I would ride along beside her on Fred as we ambled through the New Forest. We had much in common since her parents understood nothing about horses either, and I was saved from myself, at least temporarily.

      Emma was the first girl I fell in love with. One of the wonderful things about her was that she always washed her hair with Brut shampoo; sportsmen like Henry Cooper, Kevin Keegan and Barry Sheene were famous for advertising Brut aftershave during that period. It was really cheap stuff but Emma managed to make her hair smell incredible whenever she washed her hair with it, and I would hold her in a boyish embrace and nuzzle her hair, inhaling the scent, just as I had done with Conker. When we eventually drifted apart I would sometimes buy a bottle of Brut just to remind myself what she smelt like. More than thirty years later, Emma is still crazy about horses, but now she has stables of her own and she drives the horses competitively.

      Emma and I went our separate ways when she was sent to Dartington Hall School, a wayward and very costly institution in Devon, while I stayed at Chiswick for another agonising year. Although we stayed in touch, Devon was a long way away for a twelve-year-old. She made new friends, but occasionally she would turn up in London and we’d talk about horses, smoke a bit of dope and reminisce about the ghastliness of Chiswick Comp., and then she was gone again. She got married at nineteen to a wheelwright and they went to live in Wales. The marriage only lasted a short time and produced a baby. One day, fed up with the life of a wheel-wright, Emma jumped on board Fred the pony and rode him about two hundred miles from Wales to the New Forest, where her parents still lived, with the baby strapped up in front of her. She could have gone by car but loved the pony, and didn’t want to be separated from him. That’s what horses can do to you.

      While I was tearing the school apart, able only to concentrate on horses, my parents’ main concern was my father’s health. It was not the first time illness had stalked the family. My brother Rupert, born in 1963, very nearly died before he’d even got started. Water on the brain made his head swell to gargantuan proportions, which engendered a very strong protective love in my mother and meant that more often than not I was left to my own devices. Meanwhile, the pain got worse for my father, and he stubbornly kept to his walking stick even though it was obvious to everyone around him that he should be in a wheelchair. His muscles started to seize up and once he was mistaken for a drunk as he stumbled along the pavement willing his legs to work. There were pills and potions, too, and, early on, he drank vast quantities of sunflower oil. Research had suggested it might help with the symptoms and I willed it to cure him.

      As I struggled through my teenage years, so my dad’s decline became more rapid, until he was spending a lot of time in hospital undergoing one test after another. Going to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford to collect him, following yet another day-long examination, he was sitting, a stick in each hand, still just able to shuffle around a bit when I arrived. He was surrounded by wheelchairs, and people so crippled by disease and so obviously in pain and distress that it was difficult to lift my eyes off the floor. This was what was going to happen to him and I couldn’t bear to look. I asked him how his tests had gone ‘Well,’ he said, at the top of his voice, then pausing for effect, ‘they said if I was a racehorse they’d have to shoot me!’ He roared with laughter. The other patients were not so amused.

      I left school as soon as I could, just after my sixteenth birthday and before they threw me out. In the hot summer of 1977 I shaved every last hair from my head and turned up at school the following day, surrounded by crowds of admiring friends, and was duly frogmarched from the premises. I was at last free but prospects were pretty bleak. An O level in English Language was the sum total of my formal education.

      My parents had dreamt of me going to university, but from where they were sitting prison looked a more likely option, conflict abounded and we were never far from a row or argument about my lack of progress. At least I had an entire summer with horses to look forward to. During those long and painful months, my mother, who had just about given up on me, happened upon a course in Horse Business Management at an agricultural college in Witney, Oxfordshire. It was a rare moment of understanding between a sixteen-year-old and his forty-nine-year-old mother.

      The drive to Witney on that hot summer morning was memorable, largely because my mother and I were filled with hope and optimism for the first time for as long as either of us could remember. All was not lost, and she had finally got the message that it was with horses that I was happiest. The course she had found would let me spend every day with horses learning how they worked. I would be taught about veterinary medicine, breeding, nutrition and the racing industry.

      I studied under the tutelage of John Onions, a man who single-handedly changed the course of my life. Onions looked like a hobbit and had huge enthusiasm for the horse business. He knew its foibles and machinations and he also knew just how complex an industry it was if you scratched under the surface. I was taught alongside a journalist from the Sporting Life, various sons of farmers, an insurance broker and lots of pony-mad girls who were always phoning Mummy from the college call boxes to check if Moonshine or Dobbin had been fed. I felt I had arrived in a world that I’d been searching for for years.

      I lodged with Professor David Fieldhouse and his wife, Sheila, at Lower Farm in Leafield, a few miles outside Witney. A tidy, utilitarian smallholding with horses and cows, it was a perfect rustic idyll. But there was an intellectual element prevalent, too. David was Professor of Colonial and Naval History at Nuffield College and brought a rather stern rigour to the breakfast table every morning. A prolific scribbler and studious intellectual, he encouraged me to write. As I sat puffing on cigarettes, putting words down on a clapped-out Olivetti typewriter in my bedroom, the scales began to fall from my eyes. David would correct the English, punctuate the prose and push me along, all the while smoking his pipe. The Fieldhouses’ politics were about as different from my own parents’ as it was possible to be and lodging there gave me my first exposure to another way of life.

      It was while staying with them that I was introduced to the showjumping correspondent for the Daily Mail, who had been a stable lad himself and knew a great deal about horses. In time I managed to supplement my meagre income at the stables by penning articles for Pony Magazine and Dog International. The first fee I received was £100, enough to cover my board and lodgings for a month.

      The atmosphere at Lower Farm was both bohemian and agricultural. Everyone in the family rode and, each morning, I would help them mucking out the stables and feeding the horses before attending college, and then again in the evening before taking one of the horses out for a ride. I loved the routine, and, for the first time in my life, didn’t have to be bellowed at to get out of bed in the morning. Instead, before breakfast, whatever the weather, I would wait for the rest of the family to get up before we walked over to the stables and groomed, picked out the horses’ feet and tacked them up.

      In the winter Katy, their youngest daughter, and I would go hunting and in the summer to pony shows, and the problems at home seemed like a distant memory. Meanwhile, my father was becoming increasingly curmudgeonly, with even his politics veering alarmingly to the right as he got angrier and angrier as the illness took hold. I struggled to understand what he was going through, but having gone deaf at twenty-one and then developing multiple sclerosis in his forties, it was no wonder that he was raging at the injustice of it all.

      Following college, a job riding and breaking in young horses beckoned – but I got into trouble again almost immediately, primarily because I did not get on with my employer. The family I worked for in Buckingham didn’t like the rough-hewn manner that I affected. There was a ‘them and us’ divide, and if something was wrong with a horse you went to the back door of the big house, once used by the servants, to tell them. In the morning horses were tacked up for the master, his wife and daughter. Manes and tails were brushed out, hooves picked out and oiled and then the animals were paraded in front of them. For my part I did not like the way they treated the people who worked for them. They viewed their staff as an underclass and wanted me to become a member of it. There was an argument, words were spoken and I returned to my parents’ home jobless. After the magic of the previous year, it was an unexpected

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