My Animals and Other Family

by Clare Balding

  “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.

  17.

  Waterlow Park

  Amateur races do not usually elicit much newspaper coverage. A round-up in the Racing Post and the Sporting Life, perhaps a mention in Horse & Hound, yes; amateur races never make the national dailies. Never, that is, unless there is a member of the Royal Family involved.

  And, crucially:

  It was all a bit of a hoo-ha, you see. These things happen in races—a bit of bumping here, a bit of boring there: general spirited discussion. You can’t legislate for what might occur around the tight turns of, say, Beverley, if a horse happens to jump a path and takes himself to the inside rail and someone else is bumped in the process.

  Well, you can legislate, and that is what the Rules of Racing are for but, sometimes, shit happens. That’s what I’d have said to the Princess Royal, if she’d still been speaking to me. She wasn’t, though. Not after the Contrac Computer Supplies Ladies’ Handicap, a race over a mile and a half, worth £2,262 to the winner. Worth nothing to the winning jockey, obviously, apart from a rather nice crystal vase.

  It was hardly the Diamond Race at Ascot, which was the highlight of the ladies’ season—the winner got a diamond necklace—but if you’re a competitive beast, you want to win every race you enter, not just the glamorous ones. Her Royal Highness the Princess Royal rode at the Olympic Games of 1976 in Montreal, won a gold medal at the European Championships of 1971 at Burghley and two silver medals in Luhmühlen in 1975. The Princess Royal is a highly competent horsewoman, of that there is no doubt.

  As an amateur rider, her experience was less extensive. She had ridden many times over jumps, had had a few winners, and on the flat had won the Diamond Race in 1987. She had even ridden a winner for my father on a horse called Insular, who was bred by the Queen.

  Wherever the Princess Royal rode, the ladies’ changing rooms would receive a hasty makeover, which was incredibly useful for the rest of us. She changed alongside us and did not expect any special treatment. I found this rather confusing, given that I had been brought up to curtsy to the Queen and follow official protocol.

  When I
curtsyed to the Princess Royal in the changing room at Beverley and called her Your Royal Highness, she said, “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  She was standing in her underwear at the time, so perhaps a curtsy was inappropriate.

  The Princess Royal was riding a horse called Tender Type. He had finished out of the money in his three starts that season and was therefore dropping down the handicap. Waterlow Park, my mount, was having a terrific season. He’d had seven runs by the beginning of August, had won three of them and finished second or third in the others. I had ridden him to victory at Goodwood in June, and he was a lovely ride, even at home. He was a big, strong chestnut with a slightly off-center blaze of white down the front of his head. He was quiet and gentle, an all-around gent. He was the perfect ride for an apprentice or an amateur.

  My mother had driven me to Beverley. As we neared the course, I felt the familiar twinge in my stomach. It wasn’t stomach cramps due to laxatives; it was nerves. I rubbed my hands together—they were clammy; and my jaw was tense. I asked Mum if I could put on the lucky songs I needed to listen to before I got to the racecourse and, fairly soon, as we bombed along the A614, Peter Gabriel’s “Big Time” was blasting out of the cassette player.

  My mother joined in for the chorus, and we were screaming, “Big time, so much larger than life!” as a Range Rover sped past us.

  “That was Princess Anne,” said my mother. “Make sure you keep out of her way today.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I sang back. “Big time, my house is getting bigger. Big time, my eyes are getting bigger. And my moow-ow-outh.”

  I had read the form on all the other runners, I had thought about the race and had memorized the tactics my father wanted me to use. Once the music stopped, I was on an adrenaline wave that lasted for the next couple of hours. I was in a heightened state of nerves, talking ten to the dozen, taking in details and remembering facts that I would never normally digest. If I could have taken exams when my brain was whirring like this, I’d have got straight “A”s.

  I loved this stage, and I got more and more nervous before the race, running to the toilet more and more often until the point that we were called out to the paddock.

  “Jockeys!” a voice shouted into the changing room, and we filed out into the weighing room and down the steps into the paddock.

  My mouth would go dry and I wouldn’t say much, but as soon as I was legged into the saddle, a switch would flick. It was as if it was all happening to someone else. My heart rate slowed, my nerves disappeared and I relaxed. During the race itself, I always felt as if I had all the time in the world. If the pace was too slow, I went on. If the field was going too fast, I waited at the back of it. Gaps seemed to appear when I needed them and, if they didn’t, I would yell at someone in front to “give me some room.”

  The same thing happens now when I do live television or radio. I get nervous in the build-up, have to listen to some loud music in my headphones and then, as soon as I see the red light and know we’re live, I relax. From the start of the program, I feel in control, and the more that goes wrong, the more I enjoy it. I am never happier than when the running order has been thrown out of the window, because I reckon that’s what I’m there for. Anyone can present a program that is going well; it’s what you do when it’s going tits up that makes the difference.

  In this particular race, there were ten runners. Elaine Bronson, who had become a firm friend, Amanda Harwood and Tracey Bailey (who was married to the trainer Kim Bailey) were all in the line-up. The Princess Royal was wearing colors similar to mine—hers were chocolate and turquoise, mine turquoise and brown.

  “I hope the gamblers don’t get us mixed up,” I said as we circled at the start.

  “Unlikely,” she replied.

  I swallowed hard, even though there was no saliva to swallow. I was out of my depth.

  The mile-and-a-half start at Beverley is right in front of the stands, and the crowd was leaning over the rails, shouting encouragement to us.

  “Come on, Cler!” I heard a voice say. “Don’t mess it up. My cash is riding on your backside.”

  Waterlow Park had never been that quick to jump out of the stalls. He dawdled, stumbled slightly and broke slower than the horses all around us. We were last of the field as we passed the winning post the first time. At least, I thought we were last. As we turned away from the grandstand, he saw a path made by the pedestrians crossing to the inner section of the racecourse. He jumped it on an angle, took himself to the inside rail and made up about four lengths in the process.

  It was at that point that I realized I had not been last out of the stalls. One horse had reared as the gates opened and had been almost ten lengths behind us all. By the time we got to that first bend, he had made up the ground and was just behind me, on my inside as Waterlow Park jumped the path.

  “What the hell are you doing? Watch out! Watch out!”

  There were other words that were shouted. Naughty words that I need not repeat here.

  Oh God, I thought. I’ve carved someone up. At least it wasn’t the Princess Royal. She’d never swear like that.

  I heard more chatter behind me, but I was focused on the horses ahead of me, on where the gaps might appear and what I needed to do to achieve the best possible finish. There was that man who had staked his cash on my backside. I needed to do my best for him.

  We swung into the straight, and the field fanned across the course, as they often do in amateur races. It was like the parting of the Red Sea, and I let Waterlow Park accelerate. He didn’t find as much as I expected and could not pull clear. I kept pushing and could hear the cracks of whips all around. There were three of us in a line and then I could feel another horse closing fast. As we flashed past the line, I thought I might just have won, but I wasn’t sure.

  A stride past the line, the turquoise and chocolate colors of Tender Type were ahead. The Princess Royal had made up a huge amount of ground in the straight and had finished faster, but none of us were sure who had been in front on the line.

  I took my time pulling up, partly to allow for the result of the photo finish to be called, and partly because I was scared. I’m not sure if I was frightened of having lost or of having won. Either way, it spelled trouble.

  My mother was, to quote Procol Harum, a whiter shade of pale as she greeted me in the paddock.

  “Do you know what you’ve done?” she said, in an urgent whisper.

  “Yes! I think I’ve won.” I attempted to win her over with a hesitant smile.

  “Not that!” she replied. “The first bend. The very first bend—what the hell were you doing? You nearly brought down Princess Anne. I have just had the Duke jabbing his finger at my forehead telling me you are effing dangerous and shouldn’t be allowed loose on a racecourse in any effing country in the world.”

  The Duke was David Nicholson, the Princess Royal’s racing guardian. He was a champion jumps trainer, a man who had won Gold Cups at Cheltenham and King George’s at Kempton, a man who chewed weak people up and spat them out for breakfast, moving on to idiots for lunch and strong people for supper. He had masterminded the racing career of the Princess Royal, supervising her riding out in the morning and her rides on the racecourse, even if they were for other trainers.

  I could imagine him in full flow, accosting my mother (whom he’d known all his life) and taking out his fury on her. Now I could see him giving Princess Anne the full force of his opinion. She had been robbed. Robbed and mugged by a highwayman. Me.

  The PA made a noise. The judge had been studying the black-and-white freeze frame of the finish for well over five minutes.

  “Here is the result of the photo finish,” the voice intoned. I looked down at my saddle cloth to double-check my number. It was one.

  “First”—the PA announcer milked the dramatic pause as if he were presenting a game show—“number one.”

 
A cheer went up from those gamblers who had backed Waterlow Park. At least they were on my side. To celebrate too much would have seemed churlish, so I patted him on the neck and practiced my “humble winner” face.

  “There is a dead heat for second,” the voice continued, “between number two and number six. Fourth is number seven.”

  The distances were a short-head, dead heat and another short-head back to fourth. You could have thrown a blanket over all four of us but, right on the line, Waterlow Park had stuck his neck out, and his nose, with its sheepskin noseband, had passed the post just in front of Tender Type, who finished best of all to dead-heat for second.

  I slid to the ground and took my time taking off the saddle. I really, really did not want to go into that changing room.

  I weighed in and went out to the winner’s enclosure to receive my trophy. On the way back into the weighing room, I noticed the door to the stewards’ room was ajar and they were looking at the film of the race. I poked my head around and made history as the only winning jockey who has ever said the following: “Could I just check, are you having a stewards’ inquiry?” Plenty of beaten jockeys have asked, but if you’re declared the winner it’s usually a good idea to thank your lucky stars and move on.

  “We’re not,” said the stewards’ secretary, “but if you’d like to see the film, you’re welcome.”

  So I saw how far Tender Type had been left at the start—no wonder I hadn’t realized he could have been behind me. I saw Waterlow Park jump the path and angle himself toward the inside. Tender Type was knocked sideways, causing the Princess Royal to snatch up.

  “We can see clearly from this angle,” said the stewards’ secretary, a military man, with an upright back and clipped tones, pointing to the screen with a cane, “that you did not cause the interference intentionally, Miss Balding. Frankly, we feel that you could have done nothing about it and that it happened too early on to make any difference.”