13.

Henry

Occasionally, you come across a horse with no natural sense of self-preservation, a loose cannon, a nutter. Meet Henry.

Mum and I went to try him at Wylye near Salisbury. We were on the estate owned by Lord and Lady Hugh Russell, where the British event team used to train before major competitions. Lady Hugh Russell would spray paint spots on cross-country fences at the exact point she wished them to be jumped and bark from her electric cart at any rider who strayed left or right.

Henry was almost black, with a paler brown muzzle, dark-brown eyes and the smallest trace of a white star in the center of his face. His ears curved into sharp points, like Mr. Spock. His coat was smooth and shiny like a racehorse, his body so fine compared to that of Quirk or Stuart, and he was alert to everything going on around him, reacting to any sound or sight.

With all this space around, it surprised me that I was trying Henry in an indoor school. He had a short, bouncy canter and needed plenty of restraint, but he jumped brilliantly. I asked if I could take him outside for a gallop.

“Oh, I wouldn’t do that,” said the girl who was selling him. She paused, and then said rapidly, “The sheep are being moved today, and we’re not allowed on the cross-country course. It’s best we stay in here.”

Mum and I looked at each other, and I shrugged. I was dreadful at buying horses, because I liked them all. Even if they were difficult, I was convinced I could improve them; and if they were affectionate, I was hooked. My mother was more savvy but, in this instance, both of us were hoodwinked. Not just for saying yes, we’d take Henry, but for failing to add the condition of a week’s trial at home.

He was fine in an indoor school or in a field with a fence around it, but when Henry saw open spaces there was no stopping him. There were racehorses trained by my father that couldn’t keep pace with Henry in full flight. And full flight was what you got if you wanted to canter in a straight line. Around and around in circles—he would do that nicely; but across a field or up the Far Hedge—that would be full pelt.

I foolishly thought that, if I pointed him at some decent-sized fences, he would have to slow down. Henry thought otherwise. We once covered a cross-country course at Tweseldown so fast that the fence judge at the water didn’t even see us arriving before we were through the other side. Henry was not a horse my mother, or anyone else, wanted to ride.

I saw him as a challenge and rode him at Hickstead in the Downe House show-jumping team for the school championships. We entered that arena in trot and, as I halted and saluted the judges, it hit me that I was riding in the same arena as show-jumping legends like Eddie Macken and Harvey Smith, jumping the same jumps as Nick Skelton.

The Hickstead arena is the biggest in the world. As I asked Henry to move from halt straight into a fiery but controlled canter, it felt as if we were on a cross-country course rather than in a show-jumping arena. I kept him turning so that he wouldn’t realize how big a space it was. As I heard the bell, I circled around and through the timing beam that ran across the start.

Henry flew over the oxer, the planks and the white gate. He shortened up for the double and stretched again for a big parallel. He gathered pace as he came to the last—a brown upright with panels rather than rails—and it took all my strength to contain him. He rattled the center post where I had aimed him, but the panels stayed put. Henry had jumped a clear round, and at the home of British show-jumping, and as I took my hand off the reins to acknowledge the applause, he zoomed forward as if I’d pressed a booster button. He took off at 100 mph around the outside of the ring. I tried to pretend I had intended an impromptu lap of honor while I struggled to get him back under control.

Our Downe House team, which included Daisy Dick (later a top-class international eventer), finished third and I won an award for “Best Style” from Dougie Bunn, who owned Hickstead. He had clearly been fooled by the lap of honor.

We tried a variety of bits on Henry—the solid ones, like a Pelham and a Kimblewick; the jointed ones, like a Dr. Bristol and a Waterford; the various types of gag—American and Balding—that lowered his head as well as restrained him. None of them worked. Henry was officially uncontrollable. His competing was restricted to cross-country courses with lots of turns or just dressage and show-jumping. He certainly couldn’t go out drag hunting or team chasing, which rather spoiled my fun.

I enjoyed my holidays, because I could ride two or three horses a day, and I was never bored, but other girls at school seemed less enamoured of their time at home.

“Oh ya, we went to the south of France and it was really dull.”

Or: “Daddy had a yacht on the Med this summer, but he had to keep going back to work so it was just me and my stepmother. A bit, you know . . . boring.”

Their holidays had been a whirl of beaches, parties and shopping. I envied the glamorous lifestyle and couldn’t understand why they never seemed to have enjoyed it much. During the winter, my parents had decided—rather late in life—to take up skiing.

My father’s approach to skiing was the same as his approach to everything. He went as fast as he could and was afraid of nothing. Style was not something that bothered him, which was lucky, as he had none at all. He was like a demented cowboy tearing down the slopes, turning once in a while straight across the path of an unsuspecting skier, wiping out children at will, and falling often. He once tumbled the whole way from the top of a black run to the bottom, losing both skis and one boot on the way.

“I did it,” he said as he picked himself up at the bottom, brushing the snow from his pants, his arms and his face. He was smiling, and his eyes looked glazed. Andrew and I didn’t have the heart to point out that falling down a black run did not mean that you had skied it.

My mother was more cautious. Her main objective was to avoid my father. The best way of doing this was to ski on a different mountain.

Family skiing holidays gave me something to share with the other girls when I returned for the Michaelmas term, although most of them went in the spring, when it was much warmer and the snow was softer. Dad, of course, was busy in the spring, so we went in January when it was freezing and the snow was icy. Not that I’m complaining, just explaining how Andrew and I got frostbite on a T-bar in Zermatt.

I had grown used to feeling as if I wanted to vomit as my mother drove me through Thatcham toward Cold Ash at the start of each term. Sometimes I thought I was going to faint and maybe, hopefully, I would end up in the hospital and wouldn’t have to go back to school at all. I can’t remember exactly when I stopped feeling sick and actually started feeling excited at the beginning of term, but it must have been around the end of my Lower V/start of Upper V year.

I was playing lacrosse regularly and, because I was younger than my classmates I could play under-fourteens when the rest of the year were under-fifteens, and so on. It meant that I was the senior player on the team, instead of being the most junior in my own year. I worked hard on trying to read the game, intercepting the ball or stopping an opponent from making an attacking move. I practiced my cradling and got much better at picking up a loose ball from the ground. My fitness improved. The team were bonded by sweat, effort and mutual honor. That worked as a pretty good glue.

My mother came to watch whenever she could. She whistled at me from the sidelines so that I knew she was there. Whenever Andrew or I were in a crowd, my mother didn’t shout, she whistled, as she did for the dogs. It was a two-note whistle, like a wolf whistle in reverse. My father wasn’t interested. He didn’t understand lacrosse.

“No boundaries?” he said, when I tried to explain. “How the hell do you control the game if there are no boundaries? You mean you can run right into the crowd?”

“Well,” I said, reasonably, “the referee would probably blow the whistle if you did that but, yes, you can go behind the crowd or behind the goal if you want. It’s a really good game, Dad. You have to come.”

He made a noise like a kettle when it’s boiling.

“Sounds stupid,” he said. “Anyway, I don’t like women’s sport-.”

I persisted. “But you’ve only been to my school once, and you were really embarrassing. You told my Latin teacher she had good legs. So, don’t do that again, but you have to come to a match. Please.”

“I’ll come when you’re in the first team.”

I did eventually make the first team but I only played in three matches. In the third, I twisted my leg, ripping the cartilage and pulling the ligaments in my left knee. I hobbled off the field and was driven back to the main school by Miss Farr, who sent me up to the San—the school hospital on the second floor of Tedworth. Sister prescribed ice packs and a heavy dose of painkillers, but it was still agony when I went home for the Short Exeat.

I tried to ride. It hurt when I got on, it felt sore in walk and, as I tried to trot Henry up the main avenue, the pain was excruciating. I turned around and went back to the stud in tears.

“I can’t ride,” I said. For me, this was akin to saying, “I can’t breathe.”

My confidence was shattered. If I couldn’t ride—if I could never ride again—what would I do? What would I be any good at? What would I say to myself when things were going wrong?

I had surgery in Oxford and spent the next month on crutches. I wasn’t allowed to ride for eight weeks. My first-team career was over, and Dad never did see me play lacrosse.

So it was that I headed toward my sixteenth birthday on crutches and, thanks to orthodontic work, metal tracks on my top and bottom teeth and a head brace to wear at night: how to make a girl feel special. Despite the clear sign on my face that spelled out “Do not kiss” in metal, a boy had actually kissed me at the school ball. Well, he was either kissing me or trying to eat me—it was hard to tell—but he was sweet, and we exchanged letters for months. We never saw each other again, of course, but I liked the way he wrote the name “Hugo.”

For years, every other girl had opened Valentine’s cards—probably sent by their parents in the name of the hamster—but my pigeon- hole was empty.

“Commercial claptrap. Just an excuse to make you buy cards” was my mother’s attitude.

When I got my first Valentine’s card in writing that looked like Hugo’s, I felt that I was finally on track. I was one of the team, just like everyone else. I ignored the nagging doubts in my head and concentrated on the relief that I was fitting in at last.

The school ball was a huge success for our year. Everyone “got off” with someone, and some girls were virtually engaged by the end of the night. On the minus side, quite a lot of girls got caught smoking—half our year had to come back the following weekend to pick chewing gum off the bottoms of chairs and tables. It took them two days. I did not get caught smoking, because I did not smoke. I say this for my father’s benefit, as he insisted that my taffeta dress of red, purple and green smelled of smoke. This was because Hugo had been smoking, but I couldn’t tell him that so I just said, “It wasn’t me.”

“Don’t lie to me, Clare. I can smell smoke. I know you’ve been smoking and, given your track record, I do not feel inclined to believe you just because you tell me you haven’t.”

My father had given up smoking at the age of twelve. He told me this as if it was quite normal. His parents, like everyone else in the 1940s, kept wooden boxes of cigarettes around the house, to which guests or family members helped themselves. So Dad helped himself from the age of six to twelve, when he decided smoking ten Philip Morris full-tar cigarettes a day made him feel sick. He spent the following decades lecturing everyone else on the ills of smoking from the position of being a convert. In this instance, I was innocent, but try telling that to a born-again nonsmoker with a penchant for delivering lectures.

~

Dad, once he’d got the smoking thing out of his head, promised me that, when I was sixteen, I could ride in my first point-to-point. This was assuming that I would be able to ride again and that my knee would take the pressure of having my stirrups short, as jockeys had to. It also assumed that I wanted to ride in a point-to-point. I knew my father’s idea of fun—tying a sled to the back of a truck and flinging two young children about in the snow, flying headlong down a black run with no skis on and riding around Aintree. He said point-to-point riding was the biggest thrill in the world but, on the evidence I had, this wasn’t a great recommendation.

When I came off crutches and started to walk again, my father told me that I needed to lose weight. My mother had been making the odd comment about clothes looking tight, but my father just said it outright.

“You’ll need to ride at eleven stone with a saddle in a point-to-point,” he told me, “which should be fine, but I want you to have a really decent saddle, and you need to be fit. Much fitter than you are now. You’ve got very porky. Lose it.”

My knee was bearing up pretty well. I had to do exercises every day, lifting weights draped around my ankle, to strengthen the muscles on either side. I had a long scar where the surgeon had cut in to remove the folded-over, distorted cartilage that had caused all the trouble. The ligaments were damaged, but not torn—they would recover, with time.

Riding would be the real test. I chose Stuart because I knew he was the kindest. I led him out to the concrete mounting block so that getting into the saddle would be as easy as possible. He stood stock still, his ears pricked. I climbed gingerly into the saddle and adjusted my stirrups to be a little longer than usual. So far, so good.

We walked up through the yard, and it felt wonderful just to be on a horse again. I was nervous, worried that I would have lost my touch or that, once I started to trot, my knee would send sharp arrows of pain to my brain. We walked up the main avenue, straight on up Christmas Tree Avenue, and turned right at the top. I wanted to take my time, to savor the smell of the trees, the sight of a deer running across the fields or a buzzard hovering overhead.

We headed up the side of Cottington Hill and, once on the track that led steeply uphill, I asked Stuart to move into trot. This would be the big test. I sat up and down, up and down, my knees bending and my calves squeezing the sides of his big tummy. It didn’t hurt. It felt strange, but it didn’t hurt.

I could do it! I screamed in delight and punched the air. Stuart pricked his ears and quickened up his pace. We rode through the White Horse parking lot, crossed the main road and went through the gap by the side of the five-bar gate on to the Downs.

We cantered, with me sitting down into the saddle. We jumped on to the side of the Downs that looked over the farm. I let Stuart go a little quicker and sat up in the saddle like a jockey. I was going to be OK.

That evening, I needed a bag of frozen peas on my knee to take down the swelling. Mum said I must have overdone it. I denied it, but the next morning I was aching all over. Inside my thighs, up my bottom, my back and my arms were screaming. Dad pronounced that the only way to deal with it was to ride through the pain. My muscles had got out of the habit and I must make them learn how to do it all over again. I was a little less demanding on my limbs for the next few days and the knee seemed to be bearing up.

~

At the end of our “O” levels, my year went to the Lake District on an “Outward Bound” course. It was meant to be a year-end release, a reward for finishing our exams and a chance for us to bond in different groups than our tightly formed cliques. I was fairly unfit after a summer of exams and limited exercise, but my knee was mending and I was determined not to shirk on the physical side of things. We headed off to Penrith on the train and then across to Ullswater, where we would sleep in a Georgian mansion with dormitories for the first night.

We were woken even earlier than my father got up and told to put on our swimming outfits. As the sun rose, a large group of shivering, yawning public school girls ran down to the lake’s edge.

“In you get, then!” shouted the main Outward Bound organizer.

We looked at each other. Surely we weren’t expected to get in the freezing water?

“Come on, you bunch of overprivileged wimps!” he continued. “You’re not expecting a nice warm shower and a bar of frothy soap, are you? This is how you’d do it in the wild, so come on, get in.”

“This is a bloody sick joke,” said my friend KT. “I thought this was meant to be a treat. Not a boot camp.”

“Put your heads under. It doesn’t count unless you put your heads right under the water!”

There was a younger guide there. He could only have been about twenty-two. He whispered toward where I was standing with my friends KT, Toe and Gerry.

“It’s only water. It’s fresh, it’s clean, and it’s the best way in the world to wake up. Go on, get in. I promise you you’ll never forget the feeling.”

I decided to get it over with as fast as I could. I pulled off my robe and broke ranks, running toward the water’s edge in my swimming outfit. It was a glacial shock to the system, but I kept running, splashing and then diving under the dark surface. The nerves in my body tingled, my brain stopped for a second and then started to transmit at a thousand volts. It was the boost that I needed to recharge my aching brain.

The shores of Ullswater are deceptively welcoming—the water lapping over rounded boulders, inviting you in—but the depth of the lake means it is freezing cold even in the height of summer.

I bobbed up to the surface and shouted back to the shore, “Come on, it’s incredible!”

Mike, the younger instructor, gave me a thumbs-up from the shore. The others started to follow, one by one and then all in a rush. High-pitched screams sped across the water and bounced back from the hills on the other side. The air was filled with a storm of shrieking and nervous laughter. I swam until I was numb and then headed back. Mike was right—I did not forget the feeling.

The second evening, we slept out on the side of the lake in bivouacs. They were makeshift shelters which, as we discovered, were not watertight. It rained hard that night, the drips coming through the “roof” and making the bedding wet. As the ground around us became increasingly sodden, some of the bivouacs started to slip toward the water’s edge. I awoke to screams from Heidi and Char, whose bivouac had slid right into the lake.

I ran in my pajamas to help pull them out, while Mike rescued their backpacks and sleeping bags. Char never recovered, and even Heidi, who was habitually happy, was a shadow of herself until the fell run on the final day, when she took out her frustration by beating everyone to the finish. Never a natural runner and wary of my fragile knee, I hobbled along at the back with the stragglers, telling silly stories to take our minds off the agony of the cross-country run.

Apart from that hellish end to the week, we had a wonderful time—building rafts, rappelling, rock climbing, making our way around an agility course built high in the trees.

“Come on, Gerry, you can do it.” I was on a platform ten feet up a tree, trying to coax my friend along the wire. “Take it steady, don’t look down. That’s it.”

“I can’t do it. I can’t do it. Don’t make me do it.” Gerry was terrified of heights.

“It’s fine,” I said. “It’s fine, really, just look at me. Look me in the eye and keep walking.”

Gerry started swearing at me, said she hated everyone, hated the Outward Bound and particularly me but, as she shouted obscenities, she was making progress, so I kept talking and put out my arm for her to grab as she got close. She threw herself at the platform, both of us nearly falling off it with the impact.

“You’ve done it!” I shouted as I held on to her. “Well done, you’ve done it!”

“I hate you. I absolutely hate you!”

She continued to swear at me, but I told myself it was just the fear talking.

Mike Evans was our group leader and, if he had told me to fling myself over a cliff, I would happily have done so. I knew he would always make sure I had a rope attached to me. I trusted him completely and, as I rappelled down the side of a cliff, I had fantasies of being in an action film. I held the rope out behind me with one hand, gripping lightly with the other above my head, and bounced off the cliff sides. It was fabulous.

Away from the narrow, Z-shaped lake, we climbed toward Hellvellyn and, within an hour, were farther away from any sign of civilization than I had ever been before. After about two hours of walking, my brain stopped being cluttered with worries or daft thoughts and flicked on to a calmer setting. All I could think about was the path we were taking and the vast emptiness around us. The schoolgirl chatter had dissipated, and there was just the quiet scraping of boots and the puffing of exercising teenagers. It’s what they call “passive thinking time”—that place where your brain goes when it stops being distracted by the ephemera of life. I can only achieve it through walking or riding for a decent stretch.

We had huge adrenaline rushes that week, but we also had moments of absolute calm and the utter exhaustion that comes only from outdoor exertion. In Mike, we had a leader who knew how to make us find our core strength. He gently coaxed each girl through the start to any challenge—the moment when you go over the cliff edge or the tentative search for a new foothold as you climb up it—and then kept asking for more effort. He would not tolerate whining or bitching and, as he sat by the fire in his khaki cargo shorts, he demonstrated how few possessions were necessary in the hunt for happiness. All he needed was a flashlight, a penknife, a map and a compass.

Mike knew how to challenge us enough to push us beyond our limits without snapping us in half. Unlike the boys of our age we had all met, he was not impressed by long, wavy hair or short skirts—he was only interested in how we might broaden our experience by losing ourselves in the landscape, and in testing our initiative as well as our physical ability. I dangled from his every word because, as far as I was concerned, Mike was delivering the gospel of true living. He wasn’t a fictional figure or a film star, he was real and he was my hero.

Two years later, in 1988, I heard that Mike Evans had been killed in a climbing accident in New Zealand. I sobbed for the loss of a free spirit. I cried again when, only a few years ago, I was recording BBC Radio 4’s Ramblings on a section of the coast-to-coast path near Patterdale and came across a plaque in his memory. It was outside a remote hut that walkers use for shelter. I had to stop the recording, because my throat had constricted. In just one week he had helped me understand that the world was so much bigger and more interesting than anything I had yet experienced and that, somehow, I would find my place in it.

~

Miss Houghton had written a notice in her swirly handwriting and pinned it on the board outside her ground-floor apartment. It asked to see every girl in our year individually and gave us a timetable to fill in. I put my name in the last box, thinking that I could at least ask the others what it was all about before I had to go in.

Toe came out and told us that Miss Houghton had asked her to be a house prefect. Heidi said she had been appointed Games Captain, and Shorty was also a house prefect. We were all a little confused, as we had assumed that one of those three would be Head of House and that Miss Houghton would make that announcement later in the evening, when we were all together.

I knocked on the door.

“Come!” Miss Houghton’s voice tinkled.

“Ah, Clare. Please sit down.” She took her glasses off and let them rest on her bosom, dangling from their gold chain. There was a plate on her desk of half-finished steak and kidney pie with peas and new potatoes.

“Now, first of all, my dear, can I say, ‘Well done.’ Well done, indeed! I have never, in all my years, read such a glowing report, as it were, from the Outward Bound. You really did find your feet, didn’t you?”

“Well,” I replied, sitting back, crossing my legs and watching Miss Houghton retrieve bits of pastry from her cavernous cheeks, “I really did enjoy it. I think I was lucky—I found some things much easier than other people did, and I’m not scared of heights.”

Miss Houghton swallowed her masticated food, folded her hands in her lap and leaned forward.

“My dear, you may think that you did well, as it were, because of your own achievements, but it’s not that which impressed your group leader. Oh no. It’s how you were with those who were struggling that caught his eye.”

“Oh,” I said. I hadn’t realized we were being watched so carefully, nor had I been aware that Miss Houghton would be sent a detailed report.

“Now, as you know,” Miss Houghton continued, about to say something that I definitely did not know, “I make some of my most important decisions after my girls return from the Outward Bound, as it is my experience that it can be the making, as it were, or the breaking of some.

“Clare, it has been the making of you.” She paused to savor another saliva-softened morsel of food and then delivered the line I never expected to hear: “I would like to ask you if you would be my Head of House for next year.”

I sat up and coughed.

“You’re joking?”

“I most certainly am not,” said Miss Houghton, offended that I could question her judgment.

How could I be Head of House? I had been suspended and de-housed, I had spent most of the Lower and Upper IV in tears, I had never had any responsibility and there were about ten people in my year more deserving of the accolade.

“I’m so sorry,” I finally spluttered. “I didn’t mean to suggest that you might make a joke over something so serious. Or that you might make a joke at all, about anything. I am just so . . . so surprised. Are you sure?”

“I have never been more sure of anything,” she said. “Now if you could keep it all quiet until this evening, I would be most grateful. I will make an announcement, as it were, at our house meeting.”

She stood up and offered me her hand. I took it.

“You have come a long way, Clare. Well done. Well done indeed.”

When Miss Houghton made the revelation that evening, there was a sharp intake of breath. If we’d run a book on it, I’d have made myself a 100–1 shot and would have had no takers.

I found some change to take to the pay phone and ring home. My mother sounded as surprised as I was and was thrilled, whereas my father was matter-of-fact.

“Quite right,” he said. “I always knew you would be.”

I genuinely think Dad had forgotten that I had ever been in trouble. Sometimes, it’s quite useful that he never remembers a darned thing I have done.