Jumbo to Jockey: Fasting to the Finishing Post

I was thirteen when my father was diagnosed, the same age my own son, Jack, is now, and it was around this time that the horse bug really took hold of me. It grabbed me by the throat: there’s nothing like the horse when you’re feeling down. I’d had the experience before when I was much younger, when we lived in Muswell Hill and not grotty Ealing, where we subsequently moved to. While my father was being eaten by his horrible disease I sought solace with the horse. I would tiptoe out of the house and take the train to the stables in Harefield where we kept a series of ponies, first Bracken and then Gambol. The journey from our suburban house in Ealing, which I hated, took over an hour, and the closer I got to the stables the more I felt I had got away from the suffering at home. I used to get the train to Ruislip and then walk the three miles to the stables. Sometimes Mum would drive me but, as I know now, ferrying children around to something you are uninterested in can be particularly soul-destroying. I would stay there long after dark, until the stable owner was closing up and only then, reluctantly, walk back to the station and wait for the last train home. Mum would occasionally feign an interest in riding. Once or twice she even had a couple of lessons, but they were really only taken to placate me.

During those first years I would do anything to be surrounded by horses. There is something untouchable and unknowable about them, and they were as magical to me as characters in my favourite children’s stories. When I was around them I was able to forget for a moment what was happening to my father. I loved stroking them, but I was just as happy watching them in the field, or observing them eat and drink.

It is now more than twenty years since I last rode a horse. We have two children. There are other distractions along with the duty of putting food on the table. But I have regrets, and the one I feel most keenly as I observe others who have been successful in one horse business or another is that, through a combination of fate and error, I never pursued that promised career in the equine world. More than that is the nagging reminder that I have never done the one thing I have always wanted to do – competed on a horse in a race, on a racecourse.

Since I was a teenager I have been drawn to horses, riding and the world of horse racing, but I have never ridden in any type of race. In those early years of hanging around ponies, drowning in their aroma, I never had the bottle, the skill or the bravery to put them, or myself, to the physical limits of both our capabilities. I competed in hunter trials and gymkhanas, and have a very old sackful of rosettes to prove it. I have a grand photo, too, of me and my dad in an equine fancy-dress competition. Dad is leading me on a white pony called, funnily enough, Prince. A tiny thing and perched on top of him is me in a fantastic outfit; I mean a really brilliant, clever outfit. I was dressed as a bottle of whisky and my dad held a banner aloft proclaiming ‘You can take a White Horse anywhere’, a play on the in vogue advert of the time for White Horse Scotch whisky. My mum had spent days designing and making the outfit. We won the show. Later on there was a bit of jumping, too, the higher the better, and even though my pony at the time, Bracken, was tiny, he would jump any obstacle put in his way. But as much fun as those riding days were, it was not quite the same as actually racing a horse. And this is what I have really always wanted to do.

There is one certainty about riding in a race and that is that you have to be a particular weight. A 16-stone man has never ridden in a horse race, let alone won one, even though I once suggested in the racing column I write for The Tablet that there should be horse races for fatties in which the jockeys have to have a minimum weight of 15 stone. In my daily, very urban life in London this is the closest I now get to living out my dream, and yet almost every day I am haunted by the lure of the horse. The pull remains infectious and the desire to ride returns time and again.

It was not just my weight and general listlessness that sparked the fire to get reunited with the animal I love most in the world. I have enjoyed a good living combining the worlds of journalism and television to follow what I love, but I am at a time in my life where I am feeling disappointed, somewhat unfulfilled. Middle age is upon me, and with it has come the crisis. I will not have many years left in which to fulfil a childhood dream. Time, therefore, to do something extraordinary – just once.

One evening after Christmas, Rose and I were finishing a bottle of wine and having a ‘big conversation’ about our lives. The usual discussion about how we both drink too much (we do) and how we should cut down (which we also do from time to time) was interspersed with the reality of my weight and general lack of fitness. I weigh four stone more than I should and I am only five foot ten. ‘If you won’t lose weight for me what would you do it for?’ she asked. And then the words came out of my mouth. I don’t know why and I can only guess that I had been meaning to say them for a very long time. ‘I’d lose weight to ride again.’ Rose thought I meant hacking through woodlands or having a steady canter along verdant green turf or practising the forgotten art of the rising trot. I could see she was entirely unimpressed. And then I said: ‘I’ll do it to ride in a race, on a proper racehorse on one of Britain’s racetracks.’ That stopped her in her stride. She thought it was a great idea and from that moment onwards for the next ten months I put every effort into pulling it off.

Chapter One

The basic arithmetic was simple. To become a jockey I needed to lose five stone, to get under the minimum allowance of 12 stone. Having never been on a diet of any sort in my life before, I had no idea how long it would take or how to do it, apart from the obvious things of not eating or drinking too much. But I assumed, not unnaturally, that it would probably take a hell of a long time. If I could lose half a stone a month then by September I would have lost enough weight to be ready to race. But before I could establish when to race and how to diet, there was the question of how I could teach myself not to eat so much when surrounded by people who spend a good deal of time shopping and cooking mountains of food.

The first thing that had to be cut out was bread and pasta and butter and cheese. I remember my mother, who claimed constantly to be on a diet, saying years ago that she did the same thing. There was no precise science involved to suggest that this was the best way to proceed, but it felt like the right place to begin. The day after my announcement, Rose and I worked through what I might be able to eat and how it would fit in with what we would both still enjoy eating, since she had decided to take on the diet as well. It was not easy. We haggled and bickered and then discussed it all before reaching a compromise of sorts.

The conundrum of the diet was that since all athletes – footballers, boxers and rugby players among others – take a huge amount of carbohydrates on board, pasta and the like was a natural part of their daily intake. If I was going to be exercising for the first time in more than twenty years and put unfamiliar pressure on my body, carbohydrates would be essential for refuelling. But I wasn’t an athlete and, besides, jockeys ate virtually nothing. Where was the middle ground? We decided that, rather than simply starve four stone off my body, we would start with a diet of pulses, beans, lentils – protein – lots of vegetables, salads and fruit, and wait and see what happened. The hardest part was the wine, which had been a part of my daily life since I got my first job, but that too was struck off the list, and then put back on, before being taken off again, and finally being allowed – in moderation.

Next on the list of things to do was to call everyone I knew in the horse world – trainers, owners, agents and managers – to find out what chance I had of riding a horse on a proper racecourse. No one took me seriously. Most people said it was a mad idea and that I would soon come to my senses. Others said that there was a good probability of me killing myself. The rest just howled with laughter. But then, when I said that I really was going to do it and that no one was going to stop me, the tone changed, and I started to get the advice I needed.

What was immediately apparent was that before I could go anywhere near a horse I needed to get fit and to lose a lot of weight. Until I had done that no one was going to let me ride. Quite apart from the fact that a Thoroughbred racehorse is a very delicate creature, the dangers of falling off one are exacerbated when you are overweight. The extra pounds make riding a horse a tricky balancing act, and if you do fall off with an extra four stone of ballast pushing down on you as you connect with the ground, broken bones are inevitable. I was told to watch footage of the greatest jockeys, men like Lester Piggott and Frankie Dettori, to see how their remarkable balance and rhythm did not upset the horse’s natural gait. If the horse is put off its stride it will lose valuable ground. As I watched old tapes of their famous victories I clutched my girth and laughed to myself as I thought that this was what I was hoping, in my own way, to emulate. But I had to start somewhere.

If there was one real concern, though, it was that the pursuit of a childhood dream, in itself, was worryingly selfish, since this was all about the urge to pursue a dream that had been gnawing away at me for years. It would mean cutting myself off from my wife and children for weeks at a time as I disappeared to the countryside to train. It would mean a disruption, not just to our everyday diet but also to the children’s wellbeing, and our family life. It left me with the nagging question that I should be have been concentrating on being a responsible father. Others who had faced a midlife crisis had just gone out and bought a Porsche. Why, some asked, couldn’t I just go off and do that? On the other hand, I reasoned with myself, hadn’t the children for years thought that they had a rather eccentric fat bloke for a father, who just ate too much? For as long as they could remember they only ever saw me with a glass of wine in my hand. Surely I could do better than that? This, then, would be a new era, a challenge the like of which I had not had for years, certainly not within their lifetime.

For as long as I can remember breakfast has usually consisted of a few slices of toast with marmalade, perhaps a fried egg or a couple of rashers of bacon. Occasionally I would have a Stockbridge sausage or two, all washed down with a mug of tea with full-fat milk. What I would now be presented with at the start of each day was a breakfast truly fit for a horse. Every evening I would prepare a meal of deliciously malted crushed barley, oats, linseed and a dessert spoon of honey all soaked overnight in water. It was a cold porridge-style gruel, which was not much to look at, but was far from unpleasant, and very early on it became the highlight of my day. This was supplemented by a strong cup of Earl Grey, with skimmed milk. Without doubt the best Earl Grey available is Fairtrade tea bags sold by the Co-op. It used to be that Safeways was the best but that particular enterprise folded into Morrisons and they foolishly did away with the tea. The breakfast felt healthy, and almost immediately I could feel the difference as I digested the food quickly, and it left me buzzing with a new energy. Within days I felt better than I had in years.

Whereas before lunch constituted grazing over delicious leftovers with a glass of wine (permanently topped up), it now became a meal consisting of salad with a piece of fish or cold chicken. White beans with olive oil, thyme and tuna was another favourite; it is so good that it has become a household speciality, with which I serve up pots of tiny brown Puy lentils with finely chopped celery, onions and carrots cooked for 20–25 minutes in chicken stock. To cook the lentils, first I fried the vegetables in olive oil, then added the lentils, stirring vigorously for 2–3 minutes and then finally the chicken stock. It was a warming, intense experience and it kept the bowels open. Dinner was taken after a walk with Billy, our dog, and would generally consist of more of the lentils cooked earlier in the day, a piece of steak and a salad.

To supplement these home-made concoctions I drank between five and seven litres of water a day. This was far more than is recommended, but I stuck to it religiously in the perhaps misplaced belief that it would help flush out the fat. I kept litre bottles of water at my desk, in the car, in bed – anywhere I knew I would be for more than a few minutes. Inevitably it led me to think that I might develop another phantom ailment – this time diabetes.

For the first few weeks I deliberately stayed away from the scales, anticipating the excitement of shedding the first few pounds. I felt better, cleaner somehow and more alive but also still lumpen. When I stepped onto the scales for the first time, filled with the excitement of having achieved something special, absolutely nothing had changed. The bathroom scales just crept up to the 16 stone 7lb mark, and did the same every time I got on them. More drastic measures needed to be taken. I returned to the diet list and crossed out the drink again, vowing to give it up for five days of the week. That way I could reward myself at the weekends. For the time being, I would continue to smoke but also tried to cut back on cigarettes, too. Not that I am sure it made any difference, but it felt like the right thing to do.

So much for the innards, but what of the body that I had to shed five stone from and needed to tone into coarse muscle and sharpened reflexes? In the modern era there are so many options for fat people to lose weight. There’s a gym on every corner and swimming pools in every town. There are tennis courts and football pitches, bicycles, footpaths and now even government initiatives. When I put on my trainers for the first time, along with everyone else who was trying to make good their New Year’s resolution, I joined the crowd at our local park as we did circuits panting, wheezing and sweating like old pigs ready for slaughter. I was grateful to be told by the racing professionals that I needed to protect my knees in order hold my balance in the saddle; it meant that running was out of the question. After my brief humiliation, I started cycling instead and quickly realized that it was the perfect way to combine exercising Billy.

Billy is a golden cocker spaniel. He was a gift from my mother-in-law and soon became a secret weapon in my fight against the flab. I had never wanted a dog, relenting only to please the children, but in time he became my best mate and a source of inspiration. He was an untrained, unkempt animal with awful, slothful manners. He was greedy, hardly house-trained, could be grumpy and misbehaved at every opportunity. We had much in common. As the weeks became months and I applied the discipline, slowly he came right.

Every morning I took Billy on the lead, towing him behind me while Lara, my daughter, rode her own bike. We soon got into the routine of cycling the three miles to Lara’s school, although the first time we did this we were both nervous that Billy was going to end up under the wheels either of the bike or of a car, bus or lorry. But he got used to it and soon enough he was running alongside us, as we pedalled merrily past the morning commuters.

The weather throughout most of that winter was cold and crisp. I wore a beautiful brown tweed coat from Cordings of Piccadilly, more at home at a local point-to-point than Chelsea. Wrapped up in a puffa jacket and scarf, Lara would get dreadfully embarrassed because most parents either drove their children to school or sent nannies to escort them. After a few weeks, though, in a funny way she came round to enjoying the eccentricity of it all. Billy, on the other hand, loved it from day one. Cycling down long, tree-lined carriageways, over Chelsea Bridge, we’d stop to cross the main roads, waiting for articulated lorries to pass in a blast of diesel fumes. We took these opportunities to train Billy to sit and wait and for the lights to change before we get back on our bikes again. On the final leg of the journey we turned down Ebury Street and skirted Belgravia with people waving at us, cheering us as we arrived at the school gates. I would then chain Lara’s bike to the railings outside the school until repeating the exercise later on in the day at 3.45, when I’d go to collect her.

From school I might go to the bank, Billy still in tow, or the butcher’s, before returning home to stew some more lentils. Each time I cycled back on my own through the park I would pretend that it was a horse beneath me and not a bicycle and I would pedal furiously, overtaking Billy as he barked at me, feeling the wind in my face and knowing that every day I did this my thigh muscles would get stronger.

Working from home with Rose meant that we would meet for coffee after the school cycle ride and lunch together at 1 p.m. when we would routinely assess my diet and the exercise I was going to do. We quickly realized that the cycling alone was not enough, and so, twice a week, from the beginning of February, I took myself off to the Chelsea swimming baths just off the King’s Road and put myself through twenty lengths of really hard physical swimming, resisting the urge to resort to doggy paddle rather than the really good heart-pumping stuff of front crawl and breaststroke.

One of the many benefits of the new regime is that I found mundane weekly chores much more enticing. Going off to the shops became a welcome distraction much more easily accomplished on a bicycle than in a car. As a result, as the new regime took hold I constantly found excuses to leave the house to go for a ride on my bike. I worked out that the long driveway running west to east in Battersea Park was roughly a mile long, so each time I left the house, no matter where I was going, I would always put in a lap of the track before returning home. I would step high on the pedals and start to push, pump and tug the handlebars as if they were reins. I would try to get the bike to go flat out and kept imagining, as on those journeys back from school, that below me was not tubular steel but a real, live, galloping beast of a horse, even though I had no idea when I would be getting anyway near one.

It was only a few weeks before I was sleeping more deeply, exhausted, but exhilarated, by the exercise. From about the second week of the diet I would wake every morning quite literally feeling things – toxins, perhaps – being expunged from my body. Although I already felt leaner – even if the scales did not say as much at that stage – almost the day I started the diet spots began to appear on my face as though twenty years of three-hour lunches and fine wine was seeping out of my body. It was as though my body was celebrating the change, enjoying the respite I was affording it and was preparing itself for the transformation that I was undergoing. Very soon after I started the regime, I ceased to have the urge to eat as I once had done, to drink or to smoke. It was as though the passion I had for all these pleasures had been transferred in one fell swoop to indulging none of them as I set about straightening myself out and getting fit.

By the end of the first month I had given up smoking altogether. Even at Christmas, I had been devouring thirty cigarettes a day with religious devotion even though I was not starting until after three in the afternoon. Like any good addict, I had quit on numerous occasions in the past and found it easy, but this time it would be different, I promised myself. This time I would quit for good, another positive side-effect of going in pursuit of this dream. The only problem, I knew, was that when I stopped smoking I would have to look for some other distraction. If I could channel that dedication into another kind of obsession, then I would easily be fit for a race day in September.

Chapter Two

I was six years old, completely enamoured and unable to move for the sight of it. I was walking with my mother through a mottled concrete yard near Mill Hill, an affluent suburb of north London. The treacly, ammonia smell of horse piss coming out of the stables that housed the horses filled the gullies and drains. Those aromas do nothing for some; others dislike them so intensely that it repels them immediately. I was overcome with delight. Even forty years later I can still smell it and I can see in front of me that little Exmoor pony, Conker, with his mealy muzzle and wonky trot.

Conker stood on a bed of yellow straw, behind a huge, creosoted stable door that he could barely see over, he’d rest his chin on the top of the door and look skyward. The straw was dusty but smelt fresh and I was timid in the company of this huge creature that stood peering down at me. In reality he was tiny but from the eyes of a six-year old boy he looked an equine giant. There was a water bucket that needed refilling and I opened the top latch and walked into the stable to reach it. I thought he would swing round and kick me but he didn’t. Instead, he put his nose forward and nickered and nuzzled the top of my head. When I went to pick up his bucket he moved backwards so as not to frighten me. I darted out of the door, filled the bucket to the top with water and went back into his stable. He did nothing, just looked at me, then he came forward and put his nose in the bucket and gulped great mouthfuls of water. I backed away, still afraid that he might hurt me. His throat contracted and expanded as he swallowed the water, then he came towards me and slobbered water flecked with grain from his last meal all down my arm. I just stood there looking at him in wonder.

Conker wasn’t the first pony I had come across but he was the nicest. He smelt like a bar of mouldy soap. I could rub my face in his mane, and my hands in his coat and they would come out covered in a sticky, waxy coating of scurf. It was one of the most delicious smells I had ever come across. He was small, just over twelve hands, and I would often ride him bare-back in order to get the scurf to stick to my trousers so that I could smell them later and remind myself of him. He had a funny gait, almost lopsided, but he was very gentle with it.

Aged six, stuck in London and toiling with parentally imposed chores, I threw tantrums when it came to piano lessons and extra school tuition. The only place I wanted to be was in the stables with the horses. Such was my passion that once, when a great brute of a pony stood on my foot, rather than push him off I stood there wallowing in the pleasure of the excruciating pain. When I eventually pulled my foot from under his iron-clad hoof I saw that it had taken the skin off the top of four toes. They were bruised and bleeding but I was very proud of my injury, and for weeks afterwards I would look at the bruised and battered foot and think only of how much happiness the incident had given me.

‘Why can’t we live in the country, where the horses are?’ I repeatedly asked my mother. Throughout my childhood I pestered my parents to move. Once, my mum drove me into the country and there, behind a post and rails fence, was the most perfect black Welsh cob I had ever seen. He was in a field with a ramshackle house next to it surrounded by acres of wide-open space. I turned to my mum and said: ‘Are we coming to live here?’ She told me that we were, ‘But not just yet.’ It was an unintentionally cruel thing to say, and it wouldn’t have been practical, at least not for her. I, on the other hand, could think of nothing more perfect.

The most misguided hope I fostered was a return to Slades Farm in Somerset, to reclaim the family holding. My grandfather Percy had somewhat rashly let a part of it to the Bennett family, and with it the Bennetts acquired an agricultural tenancy – which could have lasted for generations. The three Hazzard sisters, of whom my mother was one, had been forced into the sale, in as much as they could not get vacant possession over the farm so it was worth considerably less than it might have been and consequently did not get a great price for it. I had been told the story of Percy 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 a house in the New Forest where Emma kept her pony, 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.