Jumbo to Jockey: Fasting to the Finishing Post

On the first Sunday of our stay, after walking Billy we were invited to Cranborne for lunch by some old friends, the Campbells, who lived in a house almost as charmingly dishevelled as our own. The drink flowed and the food, piled high, was brought to the table. I made a vague gesture of waving away a second helping before giving in, thinking that as soon as I got on a horse I’d be able to burn off the excess calories twice as quickly. We feasted on rare roast lamb, crisp, succulent and bloody, potatoes, spoonfuls of cheese and great hunks of bread. Dessert was a crumble with cream; there were flagons of wine. By the end of the afternoon I could feel myself bulging out of my shirt once again, like a character from a Thomas Hardy novel.

Bloated and content, I waited for the appropriate moment before telling the assembled company about my endeavour.

‘I need to ride a horse, every day’, I said.

It was a sort of ‘my kingdom for a horse’ moment when George told me that I could exercise her horse, Daz, which was stabled at her brother’s house in Cranborne, a ten-minute drive from Chettle. Perfect.

George Campbell has no fear of anything, least of all riding horses, and she loves to get her friends involved in her equine exploits. She once pleaded with me to allow her to take Lara out hunting. Envious of her fearlessness I almost agreed, thinking it would be a great thing for a pony-mad girl to do. It would be the ideal opportunity for her to experience the rush of adrenalin and fear that I hoped she would come to love.

George’s husband, Mouse, however, had other ideas. He kicked me sharply under the table and mouthed silently, ‘Do you not know we are in the presence of a mad lady here? Under no circumstances should you put her in charge of your only daughter on the hunting field. Do not do it.’ There are quite a lot of people in Dorset who agree with Mouse. And, as I was to find out later, when George is on a horse she knows only two paces – walk and flat-out gallop. She has suffered innumerable broken bones and bumps to the head but when I ask her if she ever feels nervous she says, with a huge, haunting grin sweeping across her face: ‘If it’s meant to be it’s meant to be.’ And, of course, she has a point.

By early March, two months after I started the diet, I had already lost three-quarters of a stone and was feeling much better for it. It was a moment of truth as Jack and I drove to Cranborne to meet Daz. She was a sweetie. Horses are measured in hands, from the ground to the bottom of the neck, and a hand is equal to four inches. Standing at over eighteen hands, Daz was a Thoroughbred-cross shire horse, and towered over both of us like a benevolent giant. She was such a big animal that I had to use a stepladder to get onto her and I knew that if I came off I wouldn’t be able to get back on again.

I looked around for my jockey skullcap, something you have to wear by law when exercising racehorses. All I had on was a flat cap that I liked to think made me look like the late, great Sir Noel Murless, one of the few jockeys in the history of the turf to have been knighted, and latterly a Newmarket trainer extraordinaire as well as being patron of and mentor to Lester Piggott. But that is where the comparison ended. Sitting on top of Daz, I realized that it was a hell of a long way to the ground. If I came off her and landed on my nut it would not be remotely amusing, but George told me that it was an absolute rule that if I rode Daz I had to wear a flat cap, not a skullcap. When I mentioned that if I fell off and landed head first on the tarmacked lanes of Cranborne, my children would be fatherless, she laughed. George didn’t even wear a helmet when she was pregnant with her daughter Martha. I now understand more fully why her husband didn’t want her to take Lara hunting.

My dad used to drive me mad about the type of headgear I rode in. He would read every technical report in every scientific journal that warned of the perils of the commonplace fibreglass hunting hat with the fixed peak. With great amusement he would read out the reports citing fractures that might splinter and end up embedded in the forehead of the rider. In the mid-1970s his advice had been that I should ride in a helmet favoured by Securicor delivery drivers, with a thick mattress to protect the back of the neck and a visor to cover the face. This did not go down well with me. Part of the attraction of the horse is the inherent danger, but the fact that equestrian headgear has been drastically modified since I was a child is not lost on me. My dad was right, I was wrong. Still, what I remember loving about those early days with horses was being at a gallop and feeling the wind in my hair, with a complete disregard for any health and safety considerations.

It is only when I was firmly on top of her, with no easy way down, that George told me Daz was blind in one eye. No one seemed to know much about her, bar the one irrefutable fact that she did seem to be a very kind old lady. But, like a lot of kind old ladies, she had her nasty streak and hers was that she did not like going through gates. This made me nervous. Every time we approached a gate she would back off very quickly and her front legs rose just a little off the ground, which caused me to lean forward and grab anything I could to stay balanced on top of her. I sensed that she’d had a previous punch-up with someone at a gate, and had probably been walloped around the head with a stick once upon a time. She needed to be cajoled and stroked and caressed, not beaten. When I was younger I would have been inclined to give her a bash with a stick, too, but, at the age of forty-seven, I don’t carry a stick and she did seem to respond to kindness, not brute force. Any physical confrontation with her would be laughable since she was probably ten times stronger than me, so I sat quietly in the saddle and waited for her to make up her mind.