16.

Knock Knock

The letter was in blue Biro, written in swirly letters on a lined page. It was my first experience of fan mail.

Dear Clare,

You I have chosen to be my wife.

First I will tell you about myself and a little about my past. My age, 61. Height 5'4". Going gray and bald. Wear glasses. Unemployed. Only income is from Labour Exchange £41 weekly. No savings. Live in 2 bedroom flat rented from council.

My Past: been in prison 8 times all for petty frauds. 3 months. 4 months. 6 months. 1 year and 2 years.

Clare, I only know that you are not married like myself. I also know your first thoughts will be this man must be some nutcase. A man of 61 years of age and with that prison record asking me to be his wife. That must be your first thought. You may even have a boyfriend. You may even intend to marry him. This I do not know, to me it does not matter.

I saw you on TV on Saturday and I liked what I saw. That’s why I have chosen you to be my wife. Clare, if you have love, age, looks, wealth, past does not count. I say you will have the love for me even if you have a boyfriend. Even if you do intend to marry him you will not. The love you will have for me will be too strong.

Clare, you have read this letter and you will say this man is a real nutcase and it is not even worth the price of a stamp for a reply.

Respectfully,
George Mathie

My brother, who for many years had practiced his autograph on pieces of paper left lying around the house, thought this was the best letter ever written. He wanted me to frame it. I didn’t, but I did keep it, and I reproduce it here, verbatim.

“Could be the only proposal you ever get,” he said, helpfully. “I think you should think carefully about it.”

My mother assumed it was a prank but, if it was, I have never found out who was behind it. Of course, having been taught that good manners are the most important quality in a person, I wrote back. I thanked George very much for his kind words and for his romantic belief that love would conquer all. I told him that I agreed absolutely with his sentiments and that neither his age nor his personal circumstances nor his criminal record would have put me off, but that I just didn’t feel I was ready for such a serious relationship. I did not think I could give him the love that he could so clearly offer me. I was only eighteen, I had no idea what love meant; it was me, not him.

I did not hear from George again. I suspect he moved on to another woman in tight jodhpurs who he happened to see on TV.

The reason I had been on television at all was a racehorse called Knock Knock. His sire was Tap On Wood—hence the name Knock Knock. He was owned in partnership by an octogenarian retired headmaster called Mr. George Smart and a younger man called Jon Sayer. Knock Knock had arrived at my father’s yard with one win to his name and a rapidly decreasing list of achievements. The problem was that he didn’t like racing much.

It was a mystery because, at home, you could work Knock Knock with the best three-year-old in the yard and he would outperform it on the gallops. But take him to a racecourse, and he didn’t want to know. His handicap mark was on the slide, he was getting a reputation as a bit of a dog, but I thought he was wonderful. He was the most affectionate racehorse I have ever known. He loved to be kissed and cuddled, he loved Polo mints and he detested other horses. Every time one came near he would put his ears flat back and flash his teeth. I liked to think he did it because he was protective of whoever was riding him.

Knock Knock was looked after by Francis Arrowsmith, an apprentice about the same age as me who was known as Scully. Scully would soon become the answer to the quiz question “Who rode Lochsong to victory in the Ayr Gold Cup?” but, for now, he was competing with Seamus O’Gorman and Andy Whitehall for apprentice rides in our yard. Knock Knock was “condemned” to apprentice races.

A good trainer makes few mistakes in the placing of horses, and they will win what they are entitled to win. A great trainer finds the key to horses which others cannot work out and wins races that no one else would think them capable of winning. With Knock Knock, no one could work it out. How could he be so talented at home and yet, on a racecourse, when he was smacked and kicked and cajoled to give of his best, so utterly useless?

More in desperation than inspiration, Dad entered him for an amateur race at an evening meeting at Kempton. He told me to walk the course, which I did, with Amanda Harwood, who was also riding a horse trained by her father.

“I’ve got no chance,” I told her. “Dad says to ride him like a non-trier, but I’m not really sure what that means.”

“Just the same as you ride all the others,” said Amanda, with a smile.

She really was a proper jockey. She was physically strong, a good judge of pace and she could use her stick in both hands. I could never be in her league, and I knew it, but horses would run for me, perhaps because I more or less let them do what they wanted to do.

Knock Knock was 25–1; the race was restricted to lady riders who were the wives, daughters or secretaries of a trainer. Knock Knock was carrying about a stone more in relation to the other runners than he would have done in a handicap. So I really don’t know how to explain what happened next, except to say that the front runners went much, much too fast. As we turned right-handed into the straight at Kempton, I was chatting away to Knock Knock: “Good boy, that’s the way,” I said to him. “Nice and easy, just like at home.”

Thwack went the whip of someone next to me. “Grrr,” said another jockey. “Good boy,” I cooed. Everyone else was pushing and shoving and shouting at their horses to close the gap on the leaders, and I realized that Knock Knock was still going easily.

“Go on then,” I said, letting the reins slip through my hands to give him his head. “Let’s go.”

Knock Knock had an engine—I knew that from his work at home—but this was the first time he had ever chosen to use it on a racecourse. He started to pass horses and, as he did so, he pricked his ears. Inside the final furlong, he only had one horse to catch and he did it four strides before the line. There is a photo of him with his ears pricked, me turning to look sideways for dangers and grinning like a daft thing.

There had been no pressure, no expectation, no thought from anyone that we had any chance at all. That had been the key.

Dad was laughing as we came into the winner’s enclosure, really laughing. Scully had run across to greet us, and both of us were patting Knock Knock as we would a pony.

“I said to ride him like a non-trier,” said my father, “but I never thought it would work that well.”

The key was in the kidding. Knock Knock didn’t like pressure, he didn’t like the whip and he didn’t like to be bullied. He loved to come through narrow gaps, to pass horses and he loved the glory of winning. In his next six races, he didn’t finish out of the first four.

The race that inspired the letter from George Mathie was at Sandown later that summer, when we beat Amanda Harwood on a horse owned by Prince Khalid Abdulla and Maxine Cowdrey on a horse owned by Sheikh Mohammed.

“All I could hear,” said Maxine, “was you saying, ‘Go on, good boy, go on!’ There’s no danger of him getting marked from the stick, but he might from you patting him so hard.”

Amanda was getting a bit fed up with it all.

“There I am, riding a proper finish,” she said, “and you come by with your arse in the air as if you’ve just joined in.”

The racing papers showered me with plaudits for riding such a patient race. My father said, “You might have thought she was on Mill Reef!”

Mr. Smart, Knock Knock’s owner, was thrilled that his seemingly useless gelding was now winning races that were live on television and he told my father that I could ride the horse whenever I wanted. The trouble was that there aren’t that many amateur races in the year, and even fewer over Knock Knock’s preferred distance of a mile and a quarter, so he was shared around. Scully rode him, Seamus O’Gorman rode him and even the odd professional jockey like Ray Cochrane was allowed, with strict instructions not to hit him.

~

There were two daily racing papers—the Racing Post and the Sporting Life—and either they were short of proper stories, or they figured that Amanda Harwood and myself competing for the amateur title made good copy. There was a lot of coverage that summer, including a “Father and Daughter” feature by Dad and me for the Racing Post.

“I’m all for girls riding in amateur races,” he says in the article, “but I think they will always struggle as professionals. I really don’t think they should be getting in the way of the pros.

“I certainly wouldn’t want Clare to turn professional . . . Ultimately, I’d rather she evented than race-rode. Obviously, it depends on you having a good horse, but it’s easier for girls to get to the top. Anyway, she’s not really the right shape to be a jockey!”

That’s my father for you. He always struggled to see gender as anything other than an insurmountable hurdle if you were a woman and a huge advantage if you were a man. My education had taught me completely the opposite, and I railed against this myopic view of womankind. I constantly pointed out the successes of women in politics, academia, science, medicine, business and technology.

“Wow, look at this—a woman with a brain,” I would say. “Do you think she gets in the way of the men around her?”

I tried to challenge him and make him question his own preconceptions but, inside, I was crying, because it seemed to make no difference. If I couldn’t convince my own father that women were worth an equal place in the world, how could I convince anyone else?

I still have quarrels, or “heated discussions,” with my father about the respective merits of male and female jockeys. The dedication, strength, skill and success of Hayley Turner has done much to temper his view, but my argument has always been the same—you can’t improve if you’re not given the chance to ride good horses. There are an awful lot of mediocre male jockeys who will get the call from an owner or a trainer ahead of an equally or more talented female jockey.

It seemed to me that eventing was one area where women could be judged on their merit and were not penalized for being female, so I went to work for the best event rider at the time, Lucinda Green, to discover whether I could be good enough to make it a career.

Lucinda had won Badminton six times on six different horses and was a study in brave but accurate cross-country riding. She was my idol. Suffice to say, I did not last long as her pupil assistant. I let two of her horses loose in the yard, I fed them the wrong amounts, and my brand-new skewbald called Mister Moose had ringworm and was banished back home before the week was out.

“The race riding isn’t helping your dressage, and I’m not sure you’ve got the concentration for it,” Lucinda advised me. “I can only see you getting frustrated, so, do you know what I’d do? Go to university.”

Lucinda probably saved me a decade of heartache and a fortune in horse-related expenses by being honest. The question of which university was still to be answered, so to keep me busy and prevent me battling my father on a daily basis, Mum sent me to Paris. She enrolled me in a French Civilization course at the Sorbonne, telling me that I needed to improve my language skills. If I were Alan Partridge, I would refer to this as my “Parisian Period.” Or, more accurately, my baguette phase.

Oh, the joys of a warm baguette with butter and strawberry jam—one mouthful after another of squidgy, comforting dough. So gorgeous, so cheap, so horrifically fattening. My hips expanded, my breasts filled out and my French did not really improve beyond a working knowledge of racing terms. I knew the way to Chantilly from the center of Paris and drove there each morning at five thirty a.m. to ride out for Criquette Head, whose daughter Patricia was a friend of mine.

I was riding through the woods of Chantilly on the deep, broad “pistes” accompanied by wizened Rip van Winkles who smoked Gitanes and drank espresso in one gulp. They had low, rasping voices. There were few English speakers and far fewer girls working in the yard than at home. It was a world in which I had only the language of horsemanship.

The French work riders wander around the broad pistes with their stirrups so long their feet almost touch the ground. They have their first canters, just a gentle warm-up, en masse, all of the horses cantering together in a herd. The riders stand bolt upright and shout abuse at each other. Then they gather in a forest clearing while Criquette Head tells them what to do.

The stirrup leathers shoot up in preparation for the faster gallop that is about to come. Riding styles differ around the world and, in France, the “Freddie Head technique” was de rigueur. I have never seen a jockey ride shorter than Freddie. He perched like a tiny sparrow on the back of a hippo, his feet barely coming down below the flaps of his racing saddle. It was a triumph of balance and impossible to replicate for someone of average height and weight. I know, because I tried.

Criquette asked an older lad called Gaston to keep an eye on me, and we made for the main piste. The training area at Chantilly covers 1,900 hectares (4,600 acres) and has around 120 kilometers or 74 miles of gallops. They are all deep sand, so never get firm in the summer or too heavy in the winter. The temperature stays cool for the horses under the trees of the magical forest. As we started to gallop, I was surprised to see horses coming in the opposite direction.

Apart from one horrible fall, when a horse I was riding spooked and I got trampled by the horses behind me, I managed pretty well. I had a quick cup of coffee in the yard or with Criquette and then headed off in my red Mini back to the city. The price I paid for the early mornings was a desperate need for a nap by mid-afternoon, usually in the middle of one of my lessons. That’s my excuse for not being fluent in French. On the plus side, I can drive confidently around Paris and know all the shortcuts.

All our French Civilization lessons were in French, with none of the multinational class allowed to speak in their own language. I tried to explain that I was one of the leading amateur jockeys in the UK and that I had to fly back to ride in races, but it came out all wrong. Instead, I told them I was “le premier chevalier dans la monde,” which, not surprisingly, had them looking perplexed. The first rider in the world? I don’t think so.

I also tried to tell my fellow students about the spectacular Grandes Écuries, the Great Stables at the Château de Chantilly. These were built to an unusually high specification because Louis Henri, the Duke of Bourbon and Prince of Condé, believed that, when he died, he would be reincarnated as a horse.

“Il connait qu’il would be—damn, what is ‘would be’ in French?”

“Pas d’Anglais!”

“Qu’il sera un renaissance comme un cheval.”

I did an impression of a horse, just for good measure. They thought the duke had got a job in pantomime.

When I wasn’t revving up the Mini and heading north to Chantilly, I walked everywhere in Paris. I lived in a studio appartment in the fourth arrondissement, not far from Hôtel de Ville.

I walked past the glorious city hall, re-creating in my romantic teenage brain The Kiss by Robert Doisneau. I wanted to be the woman in that photo, so I hung around the Hôtel de Ville hoping someone might kiss me. It didn’t work.

My favorite walk to classes was over the bridge to the Île de la Cité and through the flower market. It was an indulgence of olfaction: there was a smell for every mood and every feeling. I never bought any flowers, I just liked to walk through the market as I would through an art gallery, letting the color and the aroma of the flowers bathe me.

I did have a boyfriend—in the army. We had met at a party that summer, and he had asked for my phone number. He had dark, floppy hair, olive skin and sparkling eyes and was so damned handsome I could not believe he was talking to me. When he kissed me, my knees went trembly and my tummy started flipping. I assumed he would never bother to call, but he did and, for the rest of the summer months, while he was on leave, we were inseparable. He played cricket, rugby and polo, like my grandfather, and knew enough about racing not to be lost in conversation with my family.

Just before I headed off to Paris, I drove the army officer to Brize Norton. He had been deployed to the Falkland Islands for three months. I cried as we parted and told him I loved him. He paused, looked deep into my eyes and said, “I think, maybe, I love you too.”

We wrote to each other every day. Ours was an old-fashioned long-distance relationship. Occasionally, we spoke on the phone, but it was through the written word that we communicated. I wrote poetic, romantic love letters, while he wrote back about funny encounters of his time surrounded by sheep and men.

It was the perfect relationship because it existed mainly in our heads and neither of us had to change the course of our lives for each other. When he met me, I was fit and thin. It was the middle of the summer, I was riding in races and running in a sweat suit every day. I shall never forget the look on his face when I met him at Charles de Gaulle airport. It had been twelve weeks since we had last seen each other and, during that time, I had gone from the strict starvation diet of a would-be champion amateur rider to the student diet of one baguette a day. Rubens may have appreciated my new-found curves, but the army officer did not. Disappointment registered in his eyes.

“You’ve been eating well,” he said as we embraced.

The sadness is that I was used to being judged on the size of my waist and hips. I lost weight again the following year for the new season, and my father complimented me on the transformation.

“Do you love me more, now I’m thin?” I asked, breaking the rule my mother had taught me about never asking a question to which you may not want to hear the answer.

My father paused. “Yes, I think I do,” he said.

Dad hadn’t just tossed that answer into the air—he’d thought about it and still said it. Ow, ow, ow. I didn’t know that love could be turned on and off like a tap. I thought if you loved someone, you loved them forever. Good and bad, fat and thin. The army officer did not dump me, but he made it clear that he too loved me more when I was thin.

There is no doubt that I liked myself better when I was fit and light. I walked differently and had more confidence, but I found dieting had no point unless there was a goal at which to aim. Starving and dehydrating my body for the summer had left me craving food, obsessed by it and hopelessly ill disciplined once the shackles of the regime were discarded. I was either on a diet or I was eating everything in sight.

I found it harder to lose the weight I had gained in the off season, and my methods became increasingly unhealthy. I took a particularly disgusting laxative for a while. It came in a pot of granules described as “chocolate-flavored”—they could, more accurately, have been described as “manure-flavored.” I shoveled down two, three, four teaspoons of this grossness and then waited for the stomach cramps to start. Then I just had to make sure I was near a toilet.

Making myself sick, or “flipping,” as some jockeys refer to it, was an option I hated but still felt I had to do if I had overindulged. I was never that good at it, and it really hurt my throat. A few years later, Andrew, having shed his puppy fat, started riding in point-to-points and adopted some of the worst of my habits. I kept going into our bathroom and smelling sick. I remember being appalled that he was flipping.

“You did it.” He sounded accusatory.

“Yes, but that doesn’t mean you should. It’s really bad for you. Please don’t.”

I don’t think either of us had an eating disorder, as such, it was just part of what anyone in a weight-related sport will do. I bet any boxer, jockey, lightweight rower or martial-arts fighter has done the same. The scales have to be beaten, just like the opposition, so you do whatever you need to do. With horses like Mailman, Waterlow Park and particularly Knock Knock to ride in races, it was worth it for me.

I rode Knock Knock in fourteen races over three years. We won four of them and were out of the first four only twice. It was a partnership that clicked and gave me more pleasure than anything else in my race-riding career. He won sixteen races on the flat and two over hurdles from a total of eighty-three lifetime starts, amassed over £130,000 in prize money, and gave untold pleasure to his owners, George Smart and Jon Sayer. Knock Knock was adored by everyone in the yard and remained one of the best work horses my father has ever seen.