Walking Home

by Clare Balding

The following week, Alice stood on that road for an hour and only one car came past, slowly.

  So why, at that moment, on that day, at the exact moment that Percy decided to step into the road, did there have to be a car? Why? And why did it have to be going so fast?

  It happened in an instant. I heard the car, I was calling Percy, I was running into the road. I heard the thud. Percy squealed as he was thrown into the air. The driver stopped. I was by Percy’s side. I could hear a voice saying, ‘Percy’s been hit, he’s been hit by a car.’ It was my voice.

  Alice came out of the house to find me cradling his head in my lap. He had let out a big gasp of breath and weed himself in the street. I know now that was the moment he died.

  The driver was apologizing, saying he had been in a hurry because he was going to see his sister in hospital. I can’t remember what either of us said, but I remember being incredibly polite. Again a voice that sounded like mine said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s not your fault. It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have let him out. I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.’ This last bit was said into Percy’s ear, my face buried in his. Alice told the driver to go away, firmly but politely, and we carried Percy into the house.

  I did what I always do in moments of complete panic. I called my mother. She said to wrap him in a blanket, keep him warm and, if he was still breathing, to get him to a vet as soon as possible.

  I only remember fragments of the next hour. The confusion about where to find the only vet open on a bank holiday. Me trying to give Percy mouth-to-mouth in the car. My father ringing to say he was at Kempton racecourse and Simon the vet could come to the house if we needed him. Carrying Percy into the vet’s surgery when we eventually found one. Kicking the boxes in the corner of the room and screaming when she said, ‘I’m so sorry. He’s gone.’

  Even now, when I drive past that 24-hour vet’s surgery, I feel the sharp needle of pain.

  My mother rang again. I told her he was dead. We wanted to bring him down to the country to bury him there, and she said she’d meet us. We drove in silence, Percy wrapped in a blanket in a box on the back seat. When we arrived, my mother was waiting. She had organized for a hole to be dug in the dry riverbed so that we could bury him.

  My mother is not one for public displays of affection or wildly emotional scenes, but that was the most considerate thing anyone could have done.

  ‘I think you should both come for a walk,’ she said. ‘You can’t stay here all day crying, and it will do you good.’

  Now that I know about the bereavement walking group in Shropshire, I know this was the best thing she could have suggested.

  So we went for a walk with Mum and her boxers, Molly and Ruby. We didn’t say much. There wasn’t much to say. We couldn’t stay and we didn’t want to go home. We were without a safe place, and all we had was us. We held each other and cried. Big, gulping sobs of grief.

  When we eventually drove back to London, there was a small indentation on the sofa where Percy had last lain. His toys were all over the floor and his lead was hanging over the banister. The house was empty. And quiet. In the morning I thought it might all have been a horrible nightmare, but when I came down to the kitchen all I saw was the gaping hole in our lives where he used to be.

  Alice went to the park the next day by herself. She sat on a bench and cried. A well-dressed woman with a black-and-white Tibetan terrier sat next to her and asked her what had happened. Alice told her everything, and soon Dariel was holding her in her arms as she sobbed. That is how Dariel became our friend, along with Derek and Chris, David and Jocelyn, Maggie and Richard, Toby and Martin. They all understood.

  My father is a good letter writer. He wrote to me a few times at school, once at university and a couple of times since. The letter he wrote after Percy died was a masterpiece. It was to both of us. He told us how much he had enjoyed seeing us with Percy and how happy we looked, how good we were as dog owners and how much we cared. He told us that he had once run over his mother’s dog and how awful it had been. He also pointed out, gently, that the good thing about loving a dog is that you can get another dog who you will love equally, if not more. You cannot replace a person when they die, but you can replace, if not the dog, at least the dog-shaped space.

  We did fill the dog-shaped hole in our lives, and we now have Archie.

  Archie is nine years old and still looks like a puppy. He is far from perfect, but he’s ours. We walk him together as often as we can, we laugh at him running through the park or despair at him rolling in something smelly. Our time with him is ‘family time’ but without the pressure of worrying what his school report says or what subjects he should do for GCSE. He is quite naughty and has just recently started stealing food off the kitchen counter; one evening we got back home to find he’d eaten half a loaf of soda bread that had been sitting by the toaster. (His stomach gurgled, and let’s just say he was still suffering the effects the following morning.)

  Our daily walks with Archie mean that Alice and I get precious time together. We remember things half an hour into a walk that we’ve forgotten to tell each other, and we can discuss decisions about work or life without the distraction of phones or email. We fall into a rhythm and we explore our local parks or the countryside together.

  Walking. It can be a medicine for grief, a key to love, a therapy for illness. It can lift your spirits from the depths.

  LITCHFIELD–CANNON HEATH DOWN

  I hadn’t noticed it before, but Mum, Alice and I look as if we are dressed for a team competition. We are all wearing the same shade of powder blue. Mum is in a jacket I gave her, Alice is in one of my sleeveless jackets and I am wearing a fleece top of my own.

  I could open a shop selling jackets or jumpers in exactly that shade of blue. Any time we go shopping, I find something and say, ‘Isn’t this nice?’

  ‘Yes. And it’s exactly the same colour as 50 per cent of your wardrobe,’ Alice mutters.

  Of course I buy it anyway, and every six months or so I go through my clothes to share them around, to give everyone a little bit of blue in their life.

  One of the benefits of walking so much is that I have lost a lot of weight. This is all down to my mother. In the summer of 2013 I had got rather tubby. I knew it, Alice knew it and the TV camera most certainly knew it. I caught sight of myself on a monitor at the Newmarket July meeting and I was appalled. I looked as if I’d been blown up with a bicycle pump. The same week, my mother phoned Alice.

  ‘I think Clare and I both need to lose weight,’ she said. ‘I’ll take her on in a competition.’

  ‘That’s my mother telling me I need to lose weight,’ I said to Alice grumpily.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I genuinely don’t think it is. She wants to lose a few pounds and she knows you’ll egg her on, and vice versa.’

  I emailed my mother and said I was willing to take on the challenge. We would give ourselves three months and have a bet: £100 per pound shed to whoever lost more. If we put on any weight between the end date and Christmas, the money was to be paid back. We all need an incentive and the double whammy of winning a competition and money from my mother was the perfect calorie-controlled carrot for me.

  There have been a couple of times since I had my thyroid removed in 2006 that I have tried to lose weight, but I didn’t keep at it for very long. My doctor had told me that thyroxine would boost my metabolism into action and that I would be able to eat pretty much what I wanted. I took him at his word and stuffed my face.

  I remembered a conversation I’d had with the world-champion open-water swimmer Keri-Anne Payne in the autumn of 2012.

  ‘I meant to lose half a stone before the Olympics,’ I told her. ‘But looking back on it now, I’m not sure it would have made any difference.’

  ‘Oh, it would have done,’ she replied.

  ‘Thanks a lot!’ I laughed, thinking she was being a little more honest than I desired.

  Then she explained: ‘You’d have been obsessed with what you were eating,
or not eating. Your concentration would’ve been affected, your energy levels would have dropped and you’d have suffered because you wouldn’t have got through those long days or remembered all the things you had to remember. It would definitely have made a difference – in a bad way.’

  It was the first time anyone had talked to me about a diet as a negative thing. I had spent my life associating eating with greed rather than necessity. Now I realized that you have to pick your time to lose weight, and the summer of 2012 was not a good time for me to be mucking about with my calorie intake. The summer of 2013 was a different matter, and I’d got to a stage where I knew I had to do something about it. Instead of lying in bed dreaming of taking exercise, I would actually do it.

  The worst part was standing on the scales. I hadn’t weighed myself since my racing days and I didn’t want to look. It was bad, but on the plus side, I was starting at a much higher point than my mother: in terms of our challenge I could probably lose more.

  On 14 July Alice and I went on a few days’ break to Devon and Cornwall. I downloaded an app called ‘My Fitness Pal’ and entered everything I ate and drank into the phone. It gave me 1,200 calories a day but I could earn back calories if I exercised. Alice agreed to do it with me, which was sweet of her, as she weighs less than eight stone and has never needed to diet in her life. Poor Archie didn’t know what had hit him as we started pounding up the slopes of Dartmoor, sweating buckets, then doing sit-ups on top of the tor.

  Every day, I stuck to my calorie intake. If I had calories to spare, I could have a treat, like a mini packet of Maltesers (99 calories) or a Guylian sea shell (54 calories). We bought low-fat butter, low-fat mayonnaise and low-calorie ready-made meals. Plus, we walked. After a week, I felt my trousers becoming looser, and then the pounds started falling off. After three months, I had lost thirty pounds. Mum had lost ten, which isn’t bad, but was still twenty pounds less than me. You do the math, as the Americans say.

  Between October and Christmas I even lost a few more pounds. By the night of BBC Sports Personality of the Year I had lost two and a half stone, and it showed. Double Olympic gold medallist Becky Adlington was in raptures.

  ‘I just can’t believe it,’ she said. ‘I just can’t believe it. You look amazing! I kept saying to Harry [her boyfriend], “Look at Clare, just look at Clare!” In the end I think he was getting a bit worried about me but, honestly, I just can’t believe it.’

  Swimmers are very aware of their bodies and they are used to the calorie intake/outtake exchange, but it was all new to me. I was a bit surprised that everyone noticed, although it was lovely to be able to wear an outfit that I felt really comfortable in and that I knew made me look streamlined. It’s hard enough presenting a big TV programme without constantly worrying whether your bum, tum and arms ‘look big in this’ and knowing that the answer is undoubtedly ‘yes’.

  There is an obsession in this country with how people look, and women are particularly targeted. What I say on any programme never gets as much comment or attention as how I look. I have learned to live with that. Ted Walsh, who works on Channel 4 Racing at Cheltenham, said to me, ‘Jeez, I wouldn’t want to be a woman for anything! All they’re saying over there is “I liked what Clare wore yesterday better” or “That colour looks nice.” My God, it’s like you’re just a clothes horse.’

  I don’t much enjoy having my photo taken, knowing that it will inevitably lead to discussions about my figure and what I’m wearing. I’m happiest in a pair of jeans and a jumper, and no make-up. I never blow-dry my hair and I rarely brush it. Only recently did I have a few highlights put in it for the first time, to brighten it up over the winter months.

  Having said all that, I have more energy now, and it’s easier to dress for an occasion because I am not trying to hide my tummy with a scarf. It’s a sense of shame we carry, but it’s also confirmed by a society that does not value the fuller-figured woman.

  I am walking in front of my mother on the smooth, chalky downland turf when she says, ‘You aren’t going to lose any more weight, are you?’

  ‘No,’ I reply cheerily. ‘I’m not even counting calories now. Just walking every day and doing my ten thousand steps.’

  ‘Good,’ she says. ‘Because I think you’re just perfect as you are.’

  I swing round and smile at her. The joke has always been that my brother can do no wrong and is Peter Perfect.

  ‘I’ve been waiting my whole life to hear you say that, Mum,’ I laugh.

  We go through a gate on to a deeply rutted muddy track. The sign reads ‘BYWAY’ and, looking at the ruts, it seems that every vehicle that could use it has done.

  ‘You’d need a tractor to get down this,’ I say. Then we hear the roar of a motorbike and see a helmeted man coming towards us. ‘Or a bike.’

  The track leads to the new A34, built to bypass Newbury’s gridlocked roundabouts in the mid-nineties. There was a big protest about the woods that would be destroyed – the ‘Third Battle of Newbury’ (after the two during the Civil War). Eco-warriors dangled from trees and dug underground tunnels, where they hid to prevent heavy machinery moving. The last protestor to be removed from the tunnels came from the Newbury area; his name was Daniel Hooper but he was better known as Swampy.

  It caused quite a stir and put Newbury in the headlines daily. The broadcaster and botanist David Bellamy addressed a meeting of protestors and, in February 1996, five thousand people marched. Their cries fell on ears which did not want to hear and the bypass was completed by the end of 1998. Walking towards it, you see the lorries rattling along before you hear them. Weirdly, the noise doesn’t hit you until you are nearly underneath it.

  On our right is a stone memorial marking a piece of aviation history:

  Geoffrey de Havilland, assisted by Frank Hearle, carried out his first flight in his home-made aeroplane here at Seven Barrows on 10 September 1910.

  It may sound as if a Boy Scout was experimenting with a toy, but the 5th Earl of Carnarvon (the same one who funded the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb) had encouraged de Havilland and his team to base themselves at Highclere, and he witnessed that first biplane flight. He was said to be ‘elated at the success which attended the efforts of the flying men’.

  You can just imagine the thrill and the danger of those early flights, defying gravity and nature with science. De Havilland moved from Highclere to work for the Royal Aircraft Factory in Farnborough, Airco in Hendon and, finally, set up the de Havilland Aircraft Company. He designed aircraft used in both World Wars, including the Gypsy Moth and the Mosquito. He was knighted in 1944 and continued flying until he was seventy. What a life.

  The ability to take flight for a few yards would serve us well now we are at the A34. The dual carriageway cuts right across the Wayfarer’s Walk and the route across is not straightforward, unless you want to take on the traffic. We follow the way marked by a board and turn right, heading uphill on a slippery, filthy track.

  Mum suggests we walk further into the field, where it is drier, but I can see a fence up ahead where we need to turn left into the underpass, and I think we’ll get stuck the wrong side of it if we don’t keep to the path. Five muddy minutes later, with Boris pulling Mum one way and another, we realize I am wrong. We could have avoided the ankle-deep mud altogether.

  My mother restrains herself from saying ‘I told you so’, because we now have a bigger problem to overcome. Flooding.

  ‘Shall I send Boris through to see how deep it is?’ my mother suggests.

  Boris is enthusiastic about most things but, after putting a toe gingerly in the murky water, he turns his wrinkled face towards us and I could swear he shakes his head. The water is too deep. We will have to find another way. I consult my phone and decide that if we carry on towards Litchfield we can cross under the A34 and pick up a footpath that eventually links to the Wayfarer’s Walk.

  Dad has tried to call again. He wants to know what time he should meet us on the Downs to walk the last section
. Mum tells him we have had to take a bit of a diversion and will call him when we are closer. He rings again five minutes later. Mum ignores him.

  ‘He’ll just want to know if I’ve seen his glasses, because he’ll have lost them,’ she says. ‘Or it’ll be his diary, or his all-colour biro.’

  It was the soundtrack of my childhood.

  ‘Emma! Ems, where are you?’ Dad would shout. ‘I can’t find my … [fill in the gap]. Where is it?’

  I would’ve shouted back ‘How the hell do I know?’ and made him find it himself, but my mother is more tolerant. Forty-five years on, and she’s still helping him find the things he has lost.

  We pound up the hill towards Litchfield. Our limbs are feeling the effort by now – being forced into a diversion when you are walking is mentally as well as physically demanding. A mile or two out of your way seems like a marathon. Especially if you won’t listen to your mother.

  Mum says we should cut back parallel to the A34 to link up with the walk where it meets the underpass, but I have a better idea. I think we can carry on up another steep hill and then cut left on a track opposite Down Farm and link up again near Ladle Hill and Sydmonton. This is a fine plan, until we get to the top of the hill and see a sign on the left that reads ‘PRIVATE ROAD’. My mother is more respectful of private property than either my father or my brother, so we think it best to continue on the footpath. We know we are less than seven miles from home and that we’ll recognize our local area soon enough.

  Archie has picked up heavy mud on the path to the flooded underpass and it is compacting in his toes. He’s limping and keeps rolling on the path, as if to remove some kind of itch. I want to find a stream to wash his feet off but, without an OS map, I don’t know where one would be. Luckily, I can see a trough up ahead that is a hangover from an old field boundary; it isn’t used any more by sheep or cattle but is still there, gathering water. I lift Archie up and Alice washes his feet – mud, stones and bits of hedge come from between his toes. No wonder he has been so uncomfortable. He shakes himself thoroughly and trots off up the path. A dog transformed.