Jumbo to Jockey: Fasting to the Finishing Post

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 setback as my mother sighed, wondering what she was going to do with me. Exasperated, she gave me an ultimatum. Be in a job within a week, or they would no longer house me.

That was more than thirty years ago. Aged nineteen, I weighed close to 10 stone and could ride a horse well. I could canter, gallop and jump large fences, and was one step away from making the move into a life surrounded by horses. Jobs with horses were then, and still are, badly paid. Conditions are treacherous and I had very little to fall back on if I didn’t make it. In a rush of blood to the head I abandoned the ambitions for a life with horses and instead took my Olivetti to London. I have been there ever since.

Chapter Three

Six weeks into the new regime, Ralph, who had been best man at Rose’s and my wedding, came to visit with some much needed encouragement. His weight, too, is prone to ballooning since he has an appetite for food, wine and cigars to match my own. However, without telling me, in the past two months he had given up carbohydrates, cut down on wine and managed to lose two stone. He is about to reach forty and I guess he, too, is feeling that mortality is catching up on him.

We had a takeaway curry from Exotika, but no bread or popadoms. I had a green chicken masala curry, Ralph a jalfrezi and we consumed a handful of onion bhajis between us, all washed down with plenty of wine, which I justified by saying that I had not drunk all week. At the end of dinner I took a few puffs on Ralph’s cigar but didn’t like it. During dinner he was positively effusive in his praise of the progress I had made, although I pointed out that I hadn’t gone anywhere near a horse yet. It was encouraging to hear, though, that I was changing shape. Of course, like other friends, Ralph thought the project a little dotty. Years before, I used to ride with Ralph at his mother’s estate in Italy, to where I had exported from England a band of very well-bred Connemara ponies in order to establish a stud. Ralph was useless on a horse, but utterly fearless even though he had great goofy teeth and very bad sight. One day we were hacking in the hot sun through olive groves when a piece of gravel shot up from the rear hoof of the pony I was riding straight into his eye; it got under his contact lens and he screamed and shrieked like a wounded animal. His eye streaming, he begged me to stop, so we did. He abandoned his pony, Cuckoo, right there and then.

The day after our dinner, I was racked with guilt at having strayed from my monastic diet, and determined to redouble my efforts. I cycled twice round the park and made a real effort to puff myself out. I stood up on the pedals, Billy running furiously beside me, trying to keep up as I stretched my legs and felt muscles that I forgot I even had working away under the flab. I did an extra lap of the park as Billy tried to drag me home, and could feel the muscles in my legs aching when I got down off the bike. Even three weeks before I would not have been able to do that. Back home, I gobbled a small portion of linseed and barley for breakfast and a plate of lentils for lunch, cooked in chicken stock until they were firm and crunchy.

As well as upping the mileage around the park, swimming at Chelsea baths was now becoming a daily event. It is an old municipal-style pool with a spectators’ balcony running down one side. The pool is set out in lanes so only those serious about exercising go there, and there are no diving boards or water slides, so there are no children to get in the way. I plunge into the medium lane, the water is lukewarm and I set about my target of twenty lengths.

For the first five lengths I go flat out, stretching my arms and kicking my feet, taking deep breaths to expand my lungs and undo the damage that the smoking has done. Pushing against the water as hard as I can, exhaustion sets in and I slow the pace for the next five lengths, then I try full exertion for two lengths before slowing down again. I know if I were doing the exercise on dry land I’d be soaked in sweat, and with a lean lunch in my belly it is not long before I can feel the fat burning off me. The water keeps my temperature down and I can feel my heart pumping through the ripples. Back on the bike for the cycle home, my legs ache and I struggle to ride in a straight line. The discipline is marvellous, and six weeks in a proper routine has developed, all of which makes me wonder why I hadn’t started doing this twenty years earlier.

While Rose has helped me put the diet together she still brings home mouth-watering food to feed the children. To start with I was able to sit at the table with them as they ate, strong-willed enough not to be tempted to pick at their leftovers, or to find an excuse for just one small mouthful of succulent beef. By the end of February I had lost around seven pounds (or fourteen packets of butter, as I preferred to view it) and could feel that my clothes had loosened around my girth. But I knew myself too well, and could feel the temptation threatening to get the better of me. So I found ways to distract myself while the children were having dinner. I would find an excuse to be on the phone, take the dog for a walk – anything that would keep me out of the way of Mr Robinson’s sausages. In the past, as plates of delicious food were put down in front of the children I might occasionally take a mouthful of sausage from their plates, or a slice of tender chicken. Not now, though. When they ask me to come and sit with them I might finish their greens, which I know are good for me and they can’t stand.

I weigh myself every day, and eventually the needle starts to creep back anticlockwise from 15 stone 10, where it had been stubbornly fixed in the first few weeks. As I stand, I practise pushing my knees together as I have been taught to do in preparation for riding. The trousers aren’t pinching as much as they did even a week ago and I already feel much better, with all the exercise and the fresh air that is now filling my lungs. The time has come to sit on a horse and start riding for the first time in twenty years.

I last got on a horse when I was twenty-eight, on a trip to Ireland. Next to me on the plane was my most recent (and very tricky) girlfriend and ahead of us was a new adventure and with it the hope that this would be the beginning of something special. I had been sent, in the middle of a bitter winter, by the Evening Standard to write a piece about property in Ireland, a country that was in the depths of recession and twenty years into the Troubles that began in 1969. I had little interest in the piece but knew that it was an opportunity to indulge my passion for horses, and my fixation with the girl sitting beside me.

At Dublin airport we hired a car and drove to Mullingar, Co. Westmeath. I had a week to write the piece, and I decided it could wait. I had been offered a day’s foxhunting by a former Master of the Westmeath Foxhounds, and I could not possibly refuse. Hunting in Ireland was something I had never done before, but had always wanted to. My girlfriend, a lissom blonde, was at heart a girl from the shires, horsy to the tips of her upper-class toes. How she would admire me, I imagined, as I took those vast Irish walls at full gallop in pursuit of a fox. How brave. How handsome … I could not wait to show off.

Hunting in Ireland was something that all horse types aspired to. Its stone walls, open ditches and the fast galloping pace was a very different affair to the more sedate hunting fields of England, and offered everything that I loved about being on a horse. The day before the hunt, with my tutor, a grand horseman called Frankie Kiernan, we rode out to get acquainted with the countryside and to shake off the staleness of the working week.

My horse, a beast of an iron-grey gelding named Zachariah, was, at just four years old, much younger than the horses I had been used to, but his behaviour belied his youthfulness. A Thoroughbred crossed with an Irish draught (a carthorse to you and me) standing around sixteen hands high, he was perfectly bred for the job. His predominant gene being Irish draught meant that he was calm and unflustered but at the same time he moved forward nicely and seemed unperturbed by the jumping experience, traits unusual in a horse so young. He had also just been sold to my friend’s brother-in-law in England and he was due to be shipped over to Wiltshire within a matter of days. While he was inexperienced, a few words from Frankie reassured me. ‘If you try and hold that fella up like you’re doing you’ll get into terrible trouble.’ But I had an audience to impress and I thought I knew everything there was to know about horses, so I was trying to get the horse to bounce in front of the open ditches we were practising over, and then leap like a stag over them. Frankie pulled me up immediately. ‘The only way to ride open ditches is at a fast gallop,’ he said. ‘Just lean over him and let him go’. I tried it Frankie’s way and it worked a treat. Zachariah galloped and galloped and we flew round fields, over low stone walls and wide drainage ditches. London, the Standard, the job I was meant to be here doing seemed a million miles away. It was everything I hoped an Irish hunting adventure would be. My girlfriend was deeply impressed too, cooing over me for the rest of the day, so proud to be on my arm.

That night we drank and ate like kings. At that time there was none of the virgin olive oil or lattes of modern Ireland. We filled our bellies with home-made soda bread, Irish whiskey and rubbery Gubbeen cheese. Fish was in abundance and the meat was good, too. I had a few Irish whiskeys then steak, potatoes and, of course, bottles of wine. Before I went to bed I laid out my hunting clothes – breeches, a tweed jacket, hat and long black leather boots, which I waxed and polished until they shone. In the morning I washed, drank a cup of thick brown Barry’s tea and swallowed a mouthful of soft soda bread spread with salty butter. While I waited for the rest of the house to get ready, I paced up and down, hoping that the day would live up to expectations.

I rode down to the meet, and among the thirty of us gathered there was a hunting priest on a piebald cob. Schoolchildren, who should have been in class, were mounted on hairy ponies. Farmers on Thoroughbreds arrived with their wives on Irish draught horses, and rubbed shoulders with the sons and daughters of wealthy parents on flashy animals, all wanting to get on with the day. This was a ragbag of individuals, all gathered with one aim in mind – to chase a fox. I wasn’t nervous, just rather delighted that I was combining a passion for the horse and work at the same time. This was the beating heart of rural Ireland at its most glorious.

The Ireland of thirty years ago was a country where, if a wall fell, it was up to riders to close the gap using barbed wire, and where nature was allowed to overflow unchecked. Anyone out riding had to pick their way through acres of unkempt land, keeping a careful eye on where they were going. I trotted off with Zachariah as though we were old friends. He stopped and started and galloped at my instruction, like a gentleman waiting for me to tell him what to do next. We went through gateways and cantered up hills. He broke into a sweat but never appeared anxious. He was going to look after me was Zachariah.

As the morning went on and I became more confident I tried hurdling larger and larger obstacles. Jumping off a bank down into a riverbed, Zachariah stumbled but collected himself quickly and went on cantering through the water and scrambling up the other side. He was as taken by the occasion as I was, but although he was just as excited as me he wasn’t pulling, and would always wait for me to guide him before starting his gallop.

I had noticed that some of the other riders were jumping barbed wire fences, which I had avoided to begin with, having never jumped them before, but as the day progressed so my courage grew. A barbed wire fence is probably the most difficult thing a horse will be asked to jump. It is vertically upright, difficult for the equine eye to discern and, if you become entangled in it, it cuts you like cheese wire. As I sat watching the others jump over the wire, I thought they were mad, but earlier someone had hung hessian grain sacks and plastic fertilizer ones over the barbs so that the hunters wouldn’t cut themselves if they dropped a leg low when jumping, and they didn’t seem to be having any problems.

By lunchtime we had tracked a fox, the hounds were in full cry and were in full flight across the open fields. As we galloped to the top of a wide-open hill, we were confronted by a large wall. Horses were stopping and refusing to jump. Some approached, then, losing their nerve, ran out to the side. The wall was around five feet high, the same height as others we had cleared easily all day. Emboldened by how well the morning had gone so far, and egged on by some of the field, I said I’d put Zachariah over and the others could follow. The only shame was that the girl I’d come out to Ireland with was nowhere to be seen; she was going to miss my finest equine moment.

A mother and her daughter were queuing up behind me. They knew Zachariah and assured me he’d ‘pop over’ the wall with no problem. I agreed wholeheartedly. We turned a circle, broke into a canter and went steadily towards the wall. Any rider will tell you that you only ever realize how big a wall is when you’re bearing down on it, the full scale of it only becoming apparent in the split second after you have left the ground. Just as we were about to take off, I realized that it was much bigger than I had anticipated, but I need not have worried as Zachariah leapt beautifully. In that moment I became calm again, thinking that, while I was not in complete control, at least Zachariah was. I loosened the reins slightly and I gave myself over to him.

On top of the wall, unseen, lay several strands of barbed wire. Underneath me and out of my sight, Zachariah’s front hoofs clipped the coping stones on top of the wall and he scooped up the clawed wire with his forelegs. The pain must have been unimaginable, and he was still rising, gathering momentum as the spikes started to take hold of his forelegs, tightening with every centimetre further that he travelled. I looked to the right to witness fencing posts pinging out of the ground before they broke and splintered around me. Then it was happening on my left as well. As we landed, a dollop of metallic-tasting blood hit me in the mouth. I was in big trouble. Zachariah and I were the stone in a lethal barbed wire catapult. The mother behind me shouted at her daughter not to watch. ‘Look away,’ she cried, as I was battling to steady Zachariah, as the wire tightened and the ground in front of me turned red. He started bucking, trying to free himself of the wire that was cutting deeper and deeper into his flesh, as it took hold around his neck

Zachariah bobbed one way and twisted another and then the wire wrapped itself round my left knee. As he bucked ferociously beneath me, I was trying to get off to calm him down and all I could think of was that this poor young horse was going to die under me. But not before he had torn off with my leg wrapped in the wire, losing a limb as half a ton of horse hared off, dragging me behind him by the leg. I looked around, shouting out for someone to help us, but there was no one there, the mother and daughter having disappeared from sight on the other side of the wall.

Like a bronco in a rodeo, Zachariah took one last corkscrew of a turn. He bucked so high that the wire ran down his neck and ripped a two-inch hole in the toe of my boot, slicing straight through the leather, but miraculously missing my toes. There was blood everywhere, pumping out of Zachariah’s neck, covering the ground and mixing with the sweat on my face. This was not how it was supposed to end. I was twenty-eight and about to die, and taking a borrowed horse with me. I’d done nothing with my life. I didn’t want it to end like this.

In a final leap, Zachariah flung me from the saddle and galloped off down the hill, blood pouring from his neck with yards and yards of barbed wire and fencing posts chasing after him. I was shaking, near-hysterical. A man galloped off in hot pursuit of the still bleeding Zachariah. The mother and daughter gathered round to comfort me, and ask if I was OK. I just shook, unable to move. All the joy of the morning had evaporated in an instant, rich pleasure turned suddenly to horror.

Zachariah was eventually caught. I ran down the hill after him, stripping off my thick tweed jacket as I went. He was standing, shaking, sweating and frightened. I tied the jacket round his neck like a tourniquet, pulling it tight to stem the bleeding. We were only half a mile from home and someone called a vet from a nearby farmhouse and asked him to get to the house to tend an injured horse. We couldn’t decide whether to wait for a car and trailer or just run back. Zachariah was in shock and I decided to lead him, trotting back to the stables, thinking all the time he was going to die on me, right there in that lush country lane. The blood was still seeping from his neck but I took solace in the wise words a vet once uttered to me: ‘If a horse severs an artery he’s usually dead within forty-five seconds.’

Zachariah was still with me. I pounded down the lanes, egging him on to keep up, all the time thinking he would collapse. The vet was waiting, with a drip to pump an iron solution into Zachariah and slowly he began the delicate process of patching him up. There was nothing more I could do. I went into the house, poured a large whiskey, smoked a cigarette and I never got on another horse again. Zachariah survived.

My girlfriend left me not long afterwards, and for the next twenty years I couldn’t bring myself to get back in the saddle. And this was the problem. I had not ridden a horse since then, and, to be frank, was still terrified that the memories of Ireland would come rushing back at me the moment I got back on a horse. To do this properly and not get spooked I was going to need a plodder, a horse that could get my confidence back. But where would I find a horse that would look after me, and who would be mad enough to lend me one?

Chapter Four

A year before we married, Rose and I were looking for a house to rent in Dorset. I had rented a small cottage on the Rushmore estate on Cranborne Chase for several years but it was little more than a 1950s semi-detached prefab. In the winter it was wet and cold, and even in the summer the landscape was devoid of all joy. With no garden to speak of, it was little more than a bachelor pad in the countryside.

Teddy Bourke and his family own the village of Chettle, which borders the Rushmore estate in Cranborne. It was in stunned amazement that Rose and I traipsed up through the woods on the outskirts of the village one Saturday afternoon to look at Keeper’s Lodge. In a clearing stood a colonial-style bungalow, a former gamekeeper’s cottage built from brick and flint more than 150 years ago, nestling on the boundary of an ancient woodland. To say it was both beautiful and tranquil would be to misrepresent it. Keeper’s Lodge is unique. On our first viewing, as we opened the back door a herd of sheep ran out of the front. The grass around the house was knee-high, birdsong, like some distant melody, butterflies fluttered in the sunlight.

The house was gas-lit and was little more than a scruffy oasis in the midst of an overgrown wilderness. But it was perfect. There was – and still is – no rubbish collection, no postal delivery, no proper road and very few services. In the village there was a stable full of horses, and in August 1993 we took on the lease. We have been there ever since.

The children have had the benefit of growing up both in London and in a wild place with woods and birds and cows and farm animals and a small shoot that I run. Except for the supply of electricity, which we now have (don’t let anyone try to convince you that gas lighting is romantic: it isn’t) and an unkempt garden, not much has changed in the seventeen years we have been here. Friends in the village have married, given birth and died. People have come and gone but all around Chettle is an untouched idyll. Together we have shot the deer that roam in the woods, the pheasants that sit in the hedgerows and the partridge that squat in the barley fields.

Kevin and Rose Hicks have been in Chettle as long as we have and live for horses and little else. When we visited, the stables held a mix of big, hefty hunters, ex-racehorses and a small Shetland pony called Mandy. Aged five, Lara used to go down to the Hicks’s yard in the village to groom her. Just as I had done as a child, she would lovingly scrub all the mud off her, sponge out her eyes and ears and pick out her feet. Then we’d tack her up with her saddle and bridle and off we’d go for a stroll round the village.

It was to Chettle that I retreated for the winter half-term in February to get the first taste of what it would be like to get back on a horse. Apart from the occasional slip, when I gave in to the temptation of a groaning dinner table, I had managed to stick resolutely to the diet despite the shaking of a few heads of those who still could not believe what I had got myself into. I had lost just over half a stone, and was lighter now than I had been for ten years. The circuits around the park that were getting faster had given me enough confidence to think that I was making the necessary progress to pull this off. All I had to do now was get on a horse and be able to stay on it through a walk, a trot, then later a canter and a gallop.

For every rider, being on a horse is all about the gallop. It is instant gratification. It is also daring, exciting, exhilarating and dangerous, very like the way most riders like to live their lives. I don’t think an accountant has ever galloped; neither has a man who digs the road for a living. But the journalist who has just landed the big story is at it full pelt. Footballers gallop, the ones playing on a Sunday at the local rec and the ones playing in a cup final at Wembley. They gallop. It’s daring and emotional, and it is also draining. I knew that if I could learn how to gallop on a horse again then I would be some way towards getting myself out of this midlife crisis slump. Some men in the same position leave their families and disappear with young girls; others buy yachts. I have no inclination to do either.

The first port of call on arriving at Chettle, already dreaming of putting on my racing silks, was to Kevin and Rose. They were aware of my little adventure, but I was unsure how to broach the subject. You don’t just lend a horse to a 15-stone man and wave him off down the lane.

Ever since I’ve known Kevin and Rose I’ve assumed that all Rose’s horses are either deaf or impervious to her screaming and hollering: ‘Get up, you fucking bastard, or I’ll have you’ is typical of the sort of riposte she often makes to an equine miscreant. Not only that, Rose also likes to ensure that anyone within half a mile can hear her telling her horses off. They do, because you can’t help but hear her when she hollers. For a woman, her expletives are quite extraordinary. I start telling Rose about the idea of my race and I can see she is quite impressed. I have yet to find a trainer, but she offers me her own retired racehorse, Edward, to exercise. ‘He’ll carry you, even at fifteen stone,’ she says.

On the face of it this is a great idea as Edward is in the village and I can ride every time I’m here. I say ‘on the face of it’ because it is only later that Rose tells me, ‘Edward bucks a bit, oh, and he can be a bit strong. But don’t worry, you’ll be all right.’ ‘A bit strong’ means that I won’t be able to stop him until he has galloped all the way to our nearest town, Blandford Forum. ‘Bucks a bit’ means that he upends himself onto his forelegs, puts his nose between his legs and tries like hell to get rid of his rider.

I decided not to take up Rose’s kind offer, at least for the moment. When I got home I enquired at the local riding stable about the possibilities of riding one of their horses. I was cut short before I had a chance to deliver my full pitch about fulfilling a childhood dream, and was told in no uncertain terms that I was not going anywhere near their stables. This was a riding school, not a circus, I was told. I put the phone down, wondering where to turn to next.

I opted to take up Rose’s offer after all. So, most mornings we rode out. Edward was fine; he didn’t buck, he moved forward fluently. We had a great time in the early mornings, slow, long canters, pheasants shooting out of the hedgerows. Walks and trots and talking all the time about riding and racing and Rose side-eyeing me as if to say, ‘You really are mad, you are.’