My Animals and Other Family

by Clare Balding

  After an hour, it started to rain. Then it began to pour. It was getting so dark I could only just make out the white furlong-marker poles on the gallop to our left. There was no sign of Dusk and, even in my fervent desire to be a hero, I could tell we were doing ourselves no favors. We were only going to get wetter and colder. The dog had disappeared.

  Frank was supposed to be turned out at night. He was allergic to straw and all the stalls at the stud were full, so I took him up to the row of four stables by the tennis court. He had been such a good boy and I couldn’t bear to turn him out in such filthy rain. The least he deserved, I reasoned, was a warm, dry bed for the night.

  The stalls were empty and had no bedding at all. I left him standing while I carried his saddle and bridle to the tack room and then I set about my work. Andrew and I hardly did any mucking out because Liz did it all for us, so neither of us were particularly good at it, but I did know how to lay a decent bed and I was determined to do so for Frank that night. Evening stables had long since finished and there was no one around. The lads were back in their houses or watching TV in the Hostel.

  In the barn at the end of the row of stalls were some paper bales wrapped tight in black plastic. They were for racehorses with respiratory problems, because there is less dust in paper than in straw, so I figured one of those would be perfect for Frank. I split open the bag with a knife, placed it carefully back on the windowsill and picked the sharpest, shiniest pitchfork leaning against the wall.

  I raised it high above my head and speared downward through the paper bale. It felt as if it had got slightly stuck and I thought it must’ve gone right through to the ground, so I pulled it back out, with some difficulty, and then scooped under the paper to carry it to Frank’s stall.

  As I started walking, I felt an odd sensation in my left foot. It was really itchy. When I got to the stable door, I put down the chunk of paper, leaned the pitchfork against the wall and reached down. I had to pull my boot off, because my foot felt really odd. Something was wrong. I can’t remember if I saw the blood on my sock first, or the blood on the blade of the pitchfork but, either way, it made me feel sick. Like a tap being turned on, pain suddenly coursed through my body, and I collapsed against the frame of the door.

  Frank came over to nuzzle me and butt me in the ribs.

  My foot hurt so much I had to stifle a scream. I couldn’t put my boot back on, so I hopped to the nearest dwelling, which was the mobile home on blocks of concrete where Spider, the Traveling Head Lad, lived. Luckily, he answered the thud on his door.

  “Oh dear,” he said. “What have you been up to, young Clare?”

  “I’ve had an accident,” I replied, as calmly as I could. “I was out with Frank, trying to find Grandma’s whippet.” I was whispering, but I thought it was important he knew the context. “He was so good. So good. Didn’t want to turn him out in the rain. Not fair. Was making him a bed. Pitchfork. Foot . . .”

  My voice trailed off and I was falling backward, sliding out of consciousness. I felt an arm behind my head and another one under my knees. Spider had caught me and the next thing I realized was that we were heading down the gravel path by the runner beans. He was carrying me back to the house.

  My mother answered the front door to see Spider standing in the rain with me in his arms.

  “Oh God—what’s happened?” said my mother. I was coming back into the world to see Grandma over her shoulder, standing in the hall.

  “What’s she done now?” said my grandmother. “Honestly, such a drama queen.”

  “I couldn’t find her, Grandma. We looked everywhere, but I couldn’t find her.” My voice was small. I felt as if I was removed from the scene, looking on from above.

  “She’s stuck a pitchfork through her foot,” Spider told my mother as he carried me into the house. “There’s a lot of blood, but I don’t think it’s broken. She’ll probably need a tetanus shot.”

  “Thank you so much,” said my mother. “I’m sorry she disturbed you.”

  “What do you want doing with the pony?” said Spider, laying me down on the sofa and backing out of the sitting room. “The ugly one—Frank?”

  “Turn him out in the paddock at the back,” said my mother.

  “No!” I thought I had shouted it, but no one seemed to hear.

  Mum sighed; a big, deep exhalation of air. A “why?” without words.

  “You silly girl. We’d better get you to the hospital.” My mother was in practical mode now. There was to be no fussing. I had done a stupid thing and it would have to be dealt with. There were people coming for dinner and it was damned inconvenient.

  Luckily, the prong of the pitchfork had slid between my second and third toes and missed the main chunk of pedal bone. The curved blade meant that it came out the other side farther down my foot than it went in. I still have scars on top and bottom as a reminder.

  Dusk was never found. Grandma is convinced she got caught in a trap or stuck in a rabbit warren. The next day she brought over a packet of Polos for Frank to say thank you.

  ~

  My funny-colored Heinz 57 got over his fear of colored poles and became quite a good show jumper. We went to Pony Club camp together, where we won the Thelwell Prize for pony and rider most like a Thelwell cartoon. I was thrilled. (Andrew won it the following two years.)

  Frank and I had a 100 percent clear round record in hunter trials. I took him drag hunting whenever I was allowed and Andrew and I rode in pairs competitions together. Mum said she could hear us shouting at each other from two fields away as we argued about who should be leading.

  When I got too tall for Frank, Andrew rode him for a year, but then he got into polo and the day I dreaded had come. I cried all week leading up to it. We were giving Frank to a sweet little girl who I knew would look after him and remember to put sunblock on his nose, but I couldn’t bear to see him go. He trod on my toes, just for old times’ sake, as he was loaded onto their horse trailer. Then he backed up against their sparkling-clean wall and did the runniest, greenest dropping all down it and down his legs.

  Despite his propensity to make himself look his worst, despite the fact that he had no manners and no particular affection for me, I worshipped that pony. I still don’t really understand why—perhaps because he didn’t care, perhaps because I needed an ally or perhaps because I identified with him always getting it wrong and always being the outsider. Something clicked, and I loved him more because other people did not. He was tough, he didn’t care what anyone thought—mainly because he was a pony and he didn’t understand what they were saying—but he understood me and I think I understood him.

  Only a few years ago I was asked to contribute a story about my first love for a book. Who or what had I first fallen head over heels in love with? Most people chose film stars, fictional characters or real-life boyfriends or girlfriends. For me, it was an obvious choice: I wrote about Frank.

  9.

  Hattie

  At the age of ten, I had taken a Common Entrance exam. Despite a woeful score of 13 percent in math, I had been accepted by a boarding school called Downe House. It was the same school my mother had been to twenty years earlier. It sat high on a hill on the outskirts of Newbury, less than twenty minutes from home. The buildings were all white, with red-tiled roofs. The girls wore long, dark-green cloaks, which made them look as if they were skating or moving on wheels as they swept through the arched cloisters or ran down the outdoor amphitheater known as the Greek Steps.

  On the first day of the first term we arrived late. It was just getting dark and in the murky half-light all I could make out were the tennis courts and the big white walls that protected the school from the outside world.

  Andrew had told me that boarding school was fun. He seemed to have made lots of friends and he was on the rugby team, but Andrew was quite easy to please. When he made a mistake, everyone laughed. Early on at C
aldicott, his class was asked if they could name the seasons of the year. Andrew’s hand shot up.

  “Flat and National Hunt,” he said, with confidence.

  “I’m sorry?” His teacher had no idea what he was talking about.

  “In racing,” Andrew explained, “there are two seasons. The flat season, which runs roughly from the beginning of April until November. And the jumps season, also known as the National Hunt season, which runs from October to the end of April.”

  Technically, my brother was correct. But it was not the answer his teacher had expected.

  “That’s excellent, Andrew. A very original and detailed answer. Anyone else?”

  On the way to Down House, I hugged Flossy tight in the back of my mother’s Citroën Dyane. She was getting on a bit by now—her teeth were rotting, she had cysts between her toes, she was overweight and her bottom burps had got even worse—but I had begged my mother to let her come with us. Flossy snuffled at me, and I’m pretty sure she said, “Be strong. Be yourself. You’ll be fine.”

  My mother helped me with my suitcase and came with me to the door of Darwin, a new house that had been recently opened for the Remove year. It was named after Charles Darwin, who had lived at Down House in Kent, where in 1907 Olive Willis had founded a girls’ boarding school. By 1921, the number of pupils had outgrown the surroundings and the school was moved to a former nunnery called the Cloisters in Cold Ash, Berkshire.

  There were six houses in total—four for the senior girls and two for the first year. Hill House was bigger and was set down in the woods, at the end of a long path. I always thought it was rather spooky. Darwin was less architecturally impressive, but it was functional and convenient, being closer to the classrooms and the dining room.

  A tall woman with a beaked nose, hair scraped off her face and glasses on a chain answered the door.

  “You are late.” She glared at my mother, who retreated without saying a word.

  “You must be Clare. I am Mrs. Berwick,” she said, her words precise and trimmed at the edges. She would train us to write with our letters sloping forward, as that reflected an eager mind; sloping backward denoted laziness. “Follow me,” she continued, the heels of her sensible shoes clacking on the floor of the corridor. I trotted after her.

  I realized I had forgotten to say good-bye to my mother but, by the time I turned around, she had gone. I waved at the empty space she had left behind and followed the daunting Mrs. Berwick into a room where twelve other girls were sitting on squishy sofas and beanbags. I sat cross-legged on the floor, as we used to do in assembly at Kingsclere Primary School.

  “What’s that smell?” I heard one girl with long hair scooped up in a scrunchie say to another, also with long, tumbling hair.

  “I think it’s coming from over thar.” The other girl pointed toward me.

  I sniffed at my clothes and realized that I did smell of Flossy. I tried to tuck myself into as tight a ball as I could, hoping I would disappear. Mrs. Berwick looked down her beaky nose and told us all what we could and, mainly, what we couldn’t do.

  I was sharing a room with two other girls who were much older than me. Everyone was older than me by nearly a year and they all seemed to have been to boarding school before.

  “What does your father do?” a girl asked me, as she wound her long blond hair around her index finger.

  “My dad’s a racehorse trainer,” I answered.

  There was a snort from one corner, giggles from another. I heard the word “Dad” being uttered with incredulity.

  “You mean your father’s a stable boy?” the blond girl said.

  “No, he’s a trainer. He trained Mill Reef.” Usually, that was my get-out-of-jail card.

  “Huh,” said a girl whose father was a colonel in the army. “Mill Reef? Never heard of him. But if you were born in a barnful of horses, that explains why you stink of manure!”

  The other girls started laughing hysterically, rolling around on the floor together. I got up and silently left the room.

  “I can ride. I can ride,” I said to myself.

  It was the one thing I knew I could do better than anyone else at this school.

  We were straight into lessons the next day, which meant wearing the uniform of green and white striped shirts, green skirt, red or green sweater and green blazer with red stripes. I chose to wear the red sweater as it was new, whereas my green one was secondhand. Everyone else had chosen green. My skirt needed to be rolled over a few times, as it was on the big side.

  “You’ll grow into it,” my mother had promised me.

  Mum had refused to buy me the burgundy penny loafers that were on the school uniform list because they were “ridiculously expensive.” Instead, I had orthopedic shoes that would support my arches. I hated them.

  The dining room, large enough to seat nearly three hundred girls, had a wooden floor with timber posts around the side that supported a gallery above. There was a store up there of secondhand uniforms, and my mother had instructed me to go there as soon as I could to get a cloak. Beneath the red-lined hood, underneath the chain with which I could hang the cloak, were the name tapes of girls who had owned it before me. There were five previous owners, which meant that this cloak was at least twenty-five years old. It felt like a historic object and, as I wrapped it around me, I decided that my cloak would have magic powers. I could be invisible, indestructible. That cloak would be my savior. What I did not yet know was that the cloak would also be my downfall.

  I was not stupid and rapidly realized that I needed to work on my language and my accent. Where I said “Yes,” they said “Yah.” When I said “Year,” they said “Yar.” Where I said “No,” they said “I don’t think so.” When I said “I beg your pardon?” they said “Sorry?” Everything you liked was “cool,” everything you didn’t was “gross.”

  My challenge was to break the code and, although there were some things I knew not to do or not to say—“serviette,” for example—there were other things that flummoxed me: I had no idea that black Wellington boots with yellow soles and a waterproof anorak were off limits as wet-weather gear. Hunter boots and Barbour jackets were the only acceptable outdoor attire. I was better off getting wet than wearing what my mother and I had packed for the winter months.

  Through the course of that first week, my accent duly modified, I started to make friends, and my brand-new best, best friend was called Jenny. We sat next to each other in class, I saved her a place at lunch, she laughed at my jokes and we talked about our ponies together. She invited me to stay with her in Jersey during the holidays. I was amazed. If it was this easy to make friends at boarding school, I was going to have a ball. I would have cut my finger and mixed it with the blood of her finger if she had asked me to be a blood sister.

  The weekend came and, after Saturday-morning lessons, for the first time we changed out of our uniforms into “mufti.” That’s what we called our own clothes. I had packed a sparse mufti collection, just my favorite things and a couple of new shirts with flowers on them that my mother had bought me. This was 1981—one of the greatest racing years ever. Aldaniti won the Grand National with Bob Champion, recently recovered from cancer, in the saddle. Shergar won the Derby by a record-breaking ten lengths. In second place was a horse trained by my father called Glint of Gold. His jockey, John Matthias, who had breakfast with us every morning, hadn’t been able to see Shergar because he was so far in front. John genuinely thought he had won.

  Unfortunately for me, I may have known which horses finished first in the Derby and the Grand National in 1981, but I was way off the pace as a clotheshorse. My wardrobe was firmly stuck in 1975.

  Had I known anything about fashion, I would’ve known this was the era of drainpipe trousers. Jenny had a pair of bright-yellow, skin-tight jeans and a baggy, collarless shirt hanging out underneath an oversize cashmere sweater she had “borrowed” from
her father. I emerged from my three-bed dorm wearing my usual outfit.

  Jenny looked me up and down and said, with thinly veiled disgust, “What the hell are you wearing?”

  “These are my favorite pants,” I explained, smiling.

  They were blue cord flares, slightly worn at the knees, with creases down the front ironed in by Mrs. Jessop. I wore them with the black polo neck with the gold hoop on it that I wore when I was pretending to be a jockey—the one Grandma had knitted me. It was a little tight these days, but it kept me warm.

  “Well, you’re not coming anywhere near me. Not dressed like that.” Jenny turned on her winkle-picker heels and marched off.

  I saw her later with a gang from Hill House, all of them in drainpipes and baggy cashmere or lambswool sweaters pulled over their hands. They were just hanging out, not doing anything special, but they clearly knew that they were “in” and I was “out.” They knew the rules for mufti were even stricter than those for school uniforms.

  Jenny looked at me with an expression that smacked not of hatred but of something much more dangerous—pity. Such a tough thing to fight. You can fight outright prejudice, you can shout back at someone who offends you, but pity is utterly draining. There is no way to respond, no way to defend yourself and there is no coming back because pity says you will never be equals.

  Human beings are tribal. Despite our supposed superiority to other animals, we are remarkably herdlike. As children, we are more willing to discover our own character, plow our own furrow, but as society impacts upon us—in other words, the knowledge that the opinion of others has influence—we retreat to a position of safety. We hit puberty and suddenly we need to fit in, we require safety in numbers. Some people grow out of this fear of being different, this reluctance to swim against the tide. Others do not.

  Right then, at ten years old and in my first week at boarding school, I did not want to stand out. I wanted to be just like Jenny and her friends. I wanted to look the same, sound the same, think the same.