My Animals and Other Family

by Clare Balding

  I headed off to the ladies’ changing room, which was one section of a large tent, to get ready. My father’s breeches were too loose around the waist and kept falling down at the back. His boots were made of paper-thin black leather, with brown tops; they were classical and smart, but the soles felt like cardboard. I stuffed the toes with cotton batting. I wore my back protector over a cotton T-shirt. Then a cream silk scarf around my neck tied with a scarf pin that used to belong to my great-grandmother and, finally, my father’s colors—turquoise with brown sleeves and a turquoise cap.

  This was to be a rather public debut. There had been a piece in the Racing Post saying that I was making my race-riding debut. Grandma was there, along with girls from school for whom Hackwood was their local course. There were bookmakers taking actual money from people who were backing me. This was not a game anymore—there were investments from people I had never met.

  I emerged from the changing room in my outfit, feeling distinctly uncomfortable. I hated wearing a back protector, because it made me look like a hunchback and, at sixteen, I was far more concerned about how I looked than the protection it offered my spine. Dad had the saddle ready, with racing girths and surcingle balancing on top. The weight for all ladies’ races at point-to-points is eleven stone, including saddle. Some of the smaller girls needed weight cloths with lead weights to make their weight up. Suffice to say, I did not.

  Dad disappeared to saddle up Poldark and I waited with the other three girls—well, women—who were riding in the race. One was Amanda Harwood, whose father, Guy, was also a trainer. He had trained Dancing Brave, one of the most brilliant horses of all time and number one on most people’s lists of “horses that should have won the Derby.” He finished a narrow second in 1986, having won the 2000 Guineas. He would go on to win the Eclipse, the King George and the Arc.

  Amanda was a year older than me and had ridden winners already. She was focused and serious. We stood, the four of us, waiting to walk out from the tent to the rainy paddock. I think that was the worst moment of the lot. I tried to lighten the mood by chatting away, saying things I thought were funny but, for the moments before a race, were deeply inappropriate. I was getting on my own nerves, and no doubt theirs as well.

  I walked out into the center of the paddock. My father looked serious; my mother, nervous. My brother looked odd. He was wearing Dad’s old leather jacket, one of my shirts hanging loose over his jeans and a gray cardigan. It wasn’t the clothes I minded—I had been telling him exactly what to wear for about five years—it was the hair.

  Unlike the rest of us, Andrew had curly hair. It sat on top of his head like a fluffy toupee. He had tried Brylcreem, gel, mousse, fudge and wax. He had even tried hoof oil but, despite the rain, it was still a bouffant, like Lionel Blair’s.

  Dad talked me through exactly what he wanted me to do. He was firm with his instructions and went on and on about sticking to the inside rail. I was distracted by the crowds of people thronging around the paddock, so I wasn’t really listening. When he gave me a leg-up, I missed my timing fractionally. It wasn’t the most stylish or dignified arrival in the saddle. I heard tittering in the crowd, and voices saying, “Are you sure she knows how to ride?” and “I know the horse is top class but even a great horse can’t carry a passenger who doesn’t know how to drive.”

  Liz looked up at me and smiled.

  “He’s really well today,” she said. “He’s been pulling me round this paddock. You just sit tight and you’ll be fine.”

  Poldark was elegant, proud and, luckily for me, knew exactly what he was doing. We cantered down to look at the first fence, a peculiar tradition that I am sure is more for the benefit of the rider than the horse. I like it because, even in the midst of the hard-nosed industry of horse racing, it reveals a softer side—the side that acknowledges a horse’s brain and character.

  Poldark didn’t look that closely, he looked over the fence, his ears pricked and his gaze far into the distance, as if he saw beyond the tight turns of Hackwood. A few cameras clicked—he was, after all, extremely photogenic. My father always reckoned he had “the look of eagles.”

  We circled at the start, the four of us saying nothing to one another. I was looking at the crowd, while the other three were looking at the starter. They turned as the starter raised his flag and shouted, “Ready?”

  Amanda and the others were absolutely ready. I was away with the fairies. The starter’s flag dropped, and the three of them went thundering toward the first fence. I heard my father’s voice shouting at me to get a move on, realized they wouldn’t be called back and pointed Poldark in the right direction.

  On the plus side, we had a clear view of all our fences and were in no danger of jumping into the back of the other runners or being brought down if one of them fell. On the minus side, we were tailed off, a fence behind Amanda and the others. As I passed the start again, I heard my father shouting, “Give him a bloody kick! Lay up. Come on, lay up!”

  I duly moved my lower leg as much as is possible when you’re perched up a horse’s neck like a monkey up a tree. Poldark responded and started to make ground on the others. He jumped brilliantly, seeing his own stride and adjusting accordingly if he was slightly wrong. I kept my hands in the neck strap and tried not to interfere. I lost my balance a couple of times on landing, and my reins were so slippery that I didn’t have any grip, but he stayed so straight and true that I was never in danger of falling off.

  He sailed over the Open Ditch, and I could hear my schoolfriends shouting their encouragement. By the time we passed the start again, I was only a few lengths behind the others. I hugged the inside rail and, as we turned into the home straight for the final time, with two fences to jump, I snuck up the inside of Amanda Harwood.

  “What the hell are you doing there?” I heard her say, before she gave her horse two cracks with the whip. We jumped the last near enough together before her horse, Red Shah, picked up again and forged clear.

  I let Poldark ease down (or I was so exhausted I stopped riding) as we were well clear of the others, and we finished second. The first time you race over three miles is an absolute killer. Liz ran to meet me to lead Poldark back toward the winner’s enclosure, her face wreathed in smiles. She patted him and me and told us how brilliant we were.

  I could see my mother having words with Dad as they stood in the place reserved for the second. I thought he was about to launch into a Grade A scolding, but he smiled and said, “Did you enjoy that? There’s a bit we need to work on, but not bad, girl. Not bad for a first effort.”

  “I got up Amanda Harwood’s inner!” I said, relieved that he had ignored the crime of getting left at the start. “Did you see? I got right up her inner!”

  He had seen, as had Guy Harwood, who was giving his daughter grief for allowing it to happen.

  I saw Grandma walking toward us, putting money into her wallet. She smiled.

  “Well done,” she said. “At least you didn’t fall off. That would have been embarrassing.”

  “I hope you didn’t back me,” I replied. “I would have hated to lose you money.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” said Grandma, peering down at me. “I backed Amanda Harwood. She’s a proper jockey.”

  ~

  The Downe House school prefects are called seniors. They are elected by the whole school and the members of staff, with the person winning most votes being declared the Head Senior. My mother had been Deputy Head Senior in 1966. In 1988, my name was on the voting list. By virtue of being Head of House, I had been heard and seen a lot around school.

  When the voting was over, the results were announced in the large dining room. The incumbent Head Senior, Sarah Carter, revealed that I would succeed her. Toe, Heidi, Char, Shorty, KT, Becks and Gerry were all elected seniors as well, and my deputy was a laid-back, kindhearted girl called Marina Mohammed-Arif. Ours was a band of genuinely close friends, and
we were determined to work as a team.

  Having been suspended and de-housed in the Lower IV, four years later I was Head of House and Head Girl. Miss Farr pinned the metal badge on my cloak.

  “Well, well,” she said. “I knew you were worth giving a second chance, but even I could not have predicted this. Quite a turn-around, my girl. Quite a turnaround.”

  She held my shoulders and smiled.

  Now, when I walked into Miss Farr’s drawing room to sit in the chair opposite her desk, I could relax. We met once a week, and she would ask me about concerns the girls might have. She always listened to me with patience and consideration. She gave the impression that she valued what I had to say and, in return, I made sure it was worth hearing.

  It’s hard to know exactly what makes any of us click in our teenage years. It’s not an easy time of life, and you need people on your side. I had Miss Farr, and I had a brilliant English teacher called Miss Healy.

  I had never met anyone as clever as Miss Healy. She was only a few years older than us, had left Oxford the year before and this was her first job. She taught me that poetry rewards the investigative mind.

  “Look beyond the words, Clare. What does it say to you?” She looked at me and silently challenged me to allow my brain to expand.

  “The poet is a part of this, but he is not all of it,” she said. “He writes the words and they mean what they mean to him, but you, the reader, you fulfill the chemical experiment. You complete the poem. Without you, those are just words. With you and your interpretation, it becomes poetry.”

  Miss Healy was so detached, so self-contained. She made things happen. She read extensively to arrive at an informed opinion so that she could be governed by what she thought of the world, not what others thought about her.

  I wanted to be like that. I wanted to think for myself, not be consumed by what others thought of me. I wanted to be the subject of the sentence of my life, not the object—to control and initiate the things that happened, not to allow life to happen to me or be about what other people thought of me. Most of all, I wanted to have an identity that was not linked to my surname or to the achievements of my family. Perhaps that is why I had been so reluctant to embrace horse racing or even point-to-pointing. It seemed such a cliché. I would be condemned to the title of “Ian Balding’s daughter.”

  15.

  Mailman

  I think I’m having a nervous breakdown,” I said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. People like us do not have nervous breakdowns.” My grandmother was standing in our kitchen. “Only people with too much time on their hands do that.”

  Apparently, “people like us” didn’t have depression either.

  “Deeply selfish,” said my grandmother.

  We weren’t obese (“lack of self-control”) or anorexic (ditto). We didn’t get pregnant out of wedlock and we didn’t “do” divorce. When one of my relatives suddenly left his wife for another woman, Grandma said, “If he wanted to have sex, I really don’t see why he had to make such a fuss about it. Just have an affair and keep quiet. But this—so public and, frankly, so cheap.”

  Grandma used to walk every day, her walking stick in hand, striding out across the fields with her greedy Labrador, Chico, or her whippets—first Dawn, and then the ill-fated Dusk. She was a dog person. I always got the impression that she thought cats rather common—which is why it was so out of character that she had two of them: Tommy and Katie.

  She always called Tommy by his name, and he followed her around, but Katie she called Titty-Wee.

  “It’s the ugliest name I can think of,” she said. “And she is an ugly cat. Useless as well.”

  Andrew and I had never had much to do with the cats, apart from carrying out a practical experiment to prove whether or not they always landed on their feet. This involved rolling each one up in a blanket and dropping it over the banister from the top of the stairs. Yes, was the answer, they did land on their feet. We did not get the chance to repeat the experiment—not because Grandma discovered us (she may have approved) but because both cats disappeared whenever we walked into the house.

  The tension I was feeling was because my “A” levels were imminent.

  “Pressure?” Grandma scoffed. “You have no idea what pressure is.”

  I expected my grandmother to launch into a list of her most grievous worries: inheritance tax, the problems of finding a good butler these days and the difficulty of cleaning raw silk. Instead, she said, “I was in the WRNS during the war, you know. I loved it. We drove armored vehicles, deciphered codes and learned how to fire a gun. I even took an electrician’s course. I’m a whizz with a bunch of wires.”

  I had never imagined my grandmother doing anything except issuing orders to other people who “did” things. I knew she was intelligent—she did the crossword every day and she played Scrabble—but I hadn’t realized she could be practical as well.

  “It was a funny time, the war,” she said. “The world sort of turned upside down for a while. It was better when the men came back.”

  Now here’s a thing I have never understood. My grandmother was denied a trainer’s license because of a misogynistic law, she was one of the first female members of the Jockey Club, she was a steward at various top racecourses and a director of Newbury racecourse, she managed a farm and a stud, she was one of the most independent and self-sufficient women I have ever met—and yet she did not believe in equal rights for women. Nor did anyone in my family.

  “You can’t do that.”

  “Why on earth not?”

  “Well, you’re a girl, for starters.”

  My Uncle Toby, whom I adored, used to say, “Women ain’t people.” My father and brother would laugh along. My mother treated it as a joke. I never laughed, because I was appalled.

  “Are you turning into a feminist?” my mother would ask, raising her left eyebrow. She rolled the distasteful word around her tongue and spat it out.

  I was reading Mary Wollstonecraft at the time, so I was full of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. She wrote it in 1792, and I was overflowing with righteous indignation that we had achieved so little in the two centuries since.

  “I would hope I am a feminist, yes,” I said.

  I went on strike, refusing to load the dishwasher or help set the table unless Dad and Andrew did so as well. Mum never asked them to, so why should I do it?

  “Because you’re a girl,” said my brother, refusing to budge from the window bench on the inside of the table, where it was nearly impossible to get out anyway. “It’s your job.”

  I walked out, in a huff, and heard him saying, “I just don’t know why she gets so wound up about it. It’s not as if women can’t vote.”

  My father has only just stopped putting his coffee mug, still half full, in the kitchen sink and started putting it in the dishwasher, where it belongs. He is seventy-three years old and has never done the supermarket shopping. He is not an idiot, but he has found it suits him much better to pretend he can’t work the stove or the dishwasher or the washing machine, and my mother has let him get away with it.

  “You will get along a lot better in life if you learn to massage a man’s ego,” my mother told me. “Even if you have a good idea, it’s much better to let a man think it’s his idea.”

  I know what she was trying to do, but I just couldn’t see the point of massaging anyone’s ego. If they were good at what they did, I’d say so, but if they weren’t, why would I lie, just to make a man feel superior?

  I vowed that I would not pretend that I was ditzy or uninspired, I would not back down from doing the things I wanted to do and I would not wait for a man to define my position in the world. That did not mean I did not like men, but I could not deal with men who did not recognize a woman’s value beyond the size of her breasts.

  I tried to say all of that without bursting into tears, w
hich would have rather ruined the whole effect. My mother raised that dangerous left eyebrow again and said, “Well, I’m sure you feel better now you’ve got all that off your chest.”

  ~

  I had been to a meeting with the careers officer at Downe House, a short, round woman called Mrs. Trumble. She told me I was being overambitious in trying for law at Cambridge.

  “Honestly,” she drawled, in the most acerbically rich accent you can imagine, “I cannot think what it is that makes you think you are capable of Oxbridge. It is misplaced confidence, I am afraid. The other universities will take it out on you, mark my words.”

  In the short term, Mrs. Trumble was proved right. The offer from Cambridge was two “A’s and a “B.” I got an “A” and two “C’s. Not good enough for my first choice, nor for my second- and third-choice universities. I left the results slip on the kitchen table and ran down to the stud. I tacked up Stuart and disappeared for over two hours. We galloped, we jumped, we stopped to look at the view, and I told him everything as I let the tears flow. By the time I got back, I had dealt with my own disappointment. What was harder to deal with was the disappointment of my parents.

  My father could not understand why his old college, Christ’s, that had taken him with no “A” levels at all, on the basis of his ability to catch a book flung at him by the senior tutor, would not take me. Nor would Bristol, nor would Exeter.

  “I didn’t get the grades,” I explained for the third time. “It’s really simple. They made me an offer and I couldn’t match it.”

  “But I don’t understand,” he kept saying, over and over again.

  Many years later, I discovered that part of his anger derived from the knowledge that he had made a rather large donation to the Christ’s College fund. He insists that he did not try to buy me into Cambridge but I was not convinced and could happily have drowned him in the horses’ swimming pool.