I knew the way to Radley pretty well. I’d driven Andrew back to college a few times in my Mini, with him smoking out of the window, wearing his black “smoking glove” so that his hand didn’t smell. He bought packets of ten, snuck out in the garden at home and sucked so hard he made the filters soggy.
“Oh, don’t be such a square.” Andrew was cross because I wouldn’t let him smoke in the car.
“It’s my car, and I don’t like the smell. I’ll pull over in the next turnout and you can get out.”
I don’t think it’s much fun to stand on the side of a dual highway smoking, but Andrew had no bargaining room. It was my car and, as every teenager knows, your first car is your ticket to an independent life. That little red Mini was more than just a car. So, no, Andrew could not smoke in it—if we were running late, I might let him stick his head right out the window, but he had to keep it out there the whole way through the cigarette. No exhaling once he was back inside.
The speedometer went up to 90 mph, but on the downhill sections of the A34 from Newbury to Oxford, with the wind behind us, we could make it go right past 90 and around to zero. The whole car would shudder, and the steering wheel felt as if it was going to fall off in my hands. Andrew and I screamed in delight and whacked the music up loud. We had grown up with our father weaving in and out of cars on the highway, undertaking on the hard shoulder and speeding as a matter of honor—of course we thought that was the only way to drive.
~
Dad used to take us with him for his annual shopping expedition for Mum’s Christmas stocking. It was always a last-minute affair. We had to run from shop to shop, Dad dancing from one foot to another like a rugby player running around defenders as he feinted and glanced around bemused shoppers. Andrew and I trotted along behind, attempting to persuade him not to buy lacy underwear or a fluffy bra.
“Dad, I don’t think she wants that. Really.”
Andrew stood next to me, mute with embarrassment.
“But what do you think?” Dad turned to the shop assistant, usually a girl in her early twenties, who would blush deep red.
“My wife is about the same size as you—do you think this would fit?” He held the silky negligee up to the shop assistant.
“Yes, sir, I’m sure it would. Now I must just see to a customer over there . . .”
She would scamper away.
I’m sure he meant no harm. I was mortified. We took one basket each, and all three of us selected presents that we thought appropriate. My basket was full of music, books, sensible pants, soap, talcum powder and her brand of shampoo.
Dad selected on a basis of see-buy. If it was in front of him—a handbag, a belt, a pair of gloves, a jar of jam—he would put it in the basket. I reckon department stores are laid out for men who are panic buying. That’s why all those leather goods are there on the ground floor as soon as you walk through the door—so that men like my father can scoop up things they think their wife might like.
“Dad, she doesn’t like green.” I tossed out a pair of bright-green leather gloves. “And you know she can’t wear wool. Or costume jewelry—it gives her a rash.”
“But it’s nice,” my father argued. “I like it.”
“Yes, but that’s not the point.”
I looked in Andrew’s basket. There was a football and a packet of jelly sweets. He looked at me hopefully.
When we made it to the cash register, a voice would trill, “Cash or check, sir?”
Dad was allowed to raid the petty cash at Christmastime.
“Cash!” His voice sang out as he produced his wad with a flourish and slapped it down in front of the register.
While Dad counted the bills, Andrew shoved his new football in the bottom of a big shopping bag and covered it up with a dressing gown.
It was my job to wrap the stocking when we got home and weed out some of the less desirable objects. It was also my job to keep all the receipts for the inevitable journey back to Camp Hopson in Newbury.
~
The interview training from Radley was soon to be put to the test. Mum drove me to Newmarket, where we stayed the night, before she dropped me off at Newnham College for my day of interrogation.
I felt relaxed as soon as I walked past the porter’s desk and through the internal doors, admiring the full stretch of Newnham’s red-brick buildings, with their high-arched, white-trimmed windows. It has a feeling of space and light and I knew that, if I got in, I would have time to think.
Hidden away from the busy, rather ugly Sidgwick Avenue side of college, there are eighteen acres of gardens. There is a sunken garden, a formal pond, miles of borders and, unlike most Cambridge colleges, you can walk or sit on the lawns almost all year round. Hardly any tourists know about Newnham, so you can do so relatively undisturbed.
I liked the place. I didn’t want to admit to anyone how much, but I really, really liked it. I was ready to study again, and I wanted it to be here.
Such was my desire to impress the director of studies, Mrs. Gooder, that I almost fell over myself in my enthusiasm to get into her drawing room and start my interview. Mrs. Gooder had one of those warm faces turned at the pottery wheel of love and laughter and it made me want to hug her straight away. I restrained myself and shook her hand instead.
The study was on the ground floor of Clough Hall and had a huge desk facing out into the garden. It was large enough to have an array of sofas and chairs, which later that year would be filled with up to twenty girls exchanging views with Mrs. Gooder about Shakespeare and Dickens, Henry James and Emily Dickinson.
I have no idea what I did in that interview, other than be wildly enthusiastic about the books I liked and the challenge of prose and poetry I had yet to discover, but it seemed to work. Mrs. Gooder did not so much ask me questions; it seemed to me that we had a conversation in which we both took part.
I didn’t want the interview to end. Mrs. Gooder finally looked at her watch and politely ushered me toward the door. As I walked backward I said, “This place has the most wonderful aura. I could learn so much here. I really hope you will give me that chance.”
I meant it. I may even have come out in an immediate rash, such was my feverish desire to study at Newnham.
“We’ll see,” said Mrs. Gooder, looking at me kindly—or perhaps noticing the rash.
Less than a month later, I received a letter from Newnham College, Cambridge, saying they had accepted my application and looked forward to seeing me for the start of the new academic year in September 1990. I would be following in the footsteps of A. S. Byatt, Margaret Drabble, Iris Murdoch, Joan Bakewell, Eleanor Bron and Emma Thompson, who had all studied there.
So many people had told me that I wasn’t clever enough to get into Cambridge; that I was crazy taking another year to apply again. My mother was quietly and completely thrilled for me.
“Must have been the interview practice Dennis Silk gave you,” said my father. “Mind you, I knew they’d see sense in the end. Just ridiculous they turned you down in the first place. Ridiculous.”
“Dad,” I said, for the hundred and fiftieth time, “they didn’t turn me down. I didn’t get the grades. Remember? Bristol and Exeter—they turned me down.”
Lovely as it was that he cared, I wasn’t sure Dad really understood that this is what happened in the real world—some people liked you and some people didn’t. They would select you or not select you for universities and jobs accordingly. The real world was almost entirely subjective. His world was based on hard facts; mine would rest on whether people liked me or not. It wasn’t a case of how many winners you trained or where you stood in a table.
~
There was a lot of reading to be done that summer in preparation for my first term, but there was a lot more riding. In my third season as an amateur jockey, I was throwing everything at what might be the only chance I would ever have of
being champion and winning the Lady’s Championship I had narrowly missed the season before.
Every week, the racing calendar would arrive. This is the equivalent of the Radio Times—it is the forward planner that contains all the races in the country and the conditions required for entry. Some trainers now use a computer program to suggest every horse that is qualified for each race, but Dad didn’t have that luxury—nor would he have used it. He preferred to plan individually for every horse in the yard and write, with his all-color Biro, the name of the horses he wanted to be entered next to the relevant races. No wonder he didn’t have a lot of time for us as children.
Throughout the summer of 1990, it was not the Group races that would catch his attention first—it was the amateur ones. He looked at all of them in the calendar and tried to find a horse that was qualified and suitable. He and I both knew that my amateur career was not going to last forever, so it was now or never. I rode at Catterick, Ayr, Pontefract, Redcar, Beverley, Brighton, Goodwood, Yarmouth—it didn’t matter how far away or how little the race was worth, if it was a points-scoring opportunity, I had to be there.
I rode horses for other trainers, and I rode a few that were probably unsuitable for amateur races. I had a horror fall at Kempton, when my stirrup leather snapped and I landed like a sack of cement then was kicked in the head by a horse who trampled over me. I couldn’t remember much about it but when I came around from the concussion I kept saying, “I would have won, I would have won.”
The hospital staff patiently replied, “Of course you would have done, dear. Now drink this glass of water, tell me your name, your date of birth and the name of the prime minister.”
I missed a few races but, two weeks later, I was riding again.
One morning on the Downs, in a thick pea-souper of a fog, I was on a filly called Skazka. She had never been much of a work horse, only ever doing as much as she had to, but, on this morning, when we couldn’t see farther than fifty yards in front of us, she emerged from the fog fifteen lengths clear of her work companion. I had hardly been able to hold one side of her, but she’d kept going all the way to the top of the gallop and I struggled to pull her up.
“Interesting,” said my father. “I’ve seen that happen before in the fog. It can act like a pair of blinkers. She couldn’t see behind her so was trying to get away from the sound of being chased.”
For a while during her two- and three-year-old career, Skazka had looked as if she might be a decent filly. She was out of a mare called Winter Words, and Paul Mellon had chosen a name that is Russian for “fairytale” in the hope that this filly might be a bit special. Unfortunately, that early promise faded, and this piece of work in the fog was the first time she had shown enthusiasm in ages.
Dad entered her in the same race at Beverley—the Contrac Computer Supplies Handicap—that I had won the previous year on Waterlow Park, at the expense of the Princess Royal. He was worried that Skazka didn’t really get a mile and a half, so told me to conserve her energy. Mum and I made the familiar journey up the M1 to Doncaster, east on the M18 past Goole, and headed north of Hull to what had become my favorite racecourse.
After I had walked the course, I bumped into Elaine Bronson, who was riding an old favorite of hers called Cathos.
“What do you reckon?” she asked.
“The ground’s all right,” I said. “A bit rough just off the rail, but smooth right on it or out wide.”
“I don’t care about the effin’ ground,” she said. “What do you reckon to your chances? Bookies have got you as favorite.”
“Oh,” I said dismissively, “I’m not sure she’ll stay, to be honest. She’s never won over more than a mile.”
I wasn’t lying—I wasn’t sharp enough for that—but I hadn’t predicted that we would go no pace at all for the first two furlongs. Nothing seemed to want to make the running so, as we crossed the path that Waterlow Park had jumped a year earlier, I found myself near the front of the field. Skazka heard something that scared her and she started to motor.
I did my best to hold her, but I didn’t want to upset her rhythm by fighting too hard. Within a furlong, we were ten lengths clear of the rest and, as we turned into the straight, nothing was closing. I kept her right on the inside rail, trying to find that strip less than four feet wide that was smooth, fresh grass. My boot was scraping the rail and, as we passed the furlong marker, Skazka bumped the rail and momentarily lost her balance. I could hear someone wailing like a banshee and the thundering of hooves, but I dared not look around.
Skazka was tiring, and I just sat there, holding her together and barely moving, willing the line to come before we both fell in a heap. The dreadful noise, which I knew could only be Elaine, was getting closer but, luckily, the winning post came just in time. Two strides after it, she passed us.
“I thought you said your horse wouldn’t stay?” Elaine was shouting at me.
“I didn’t think she would,” I puffed.
I didn’t know at the time why Elaine was so annoyed but, when I saw her boss David Wilson’s face, I realized that, once again, they had had a big bet and, this time, it hadn’t worked out.
“That’s why she’s going to Cambridge,” he shouted at her. “And you never will! She had you fooled, you idiot.”
When my father rang to give me a scolding for not following his instructions, I told him that I had deliberately exploited the rest of the field’s assumption that Skazka wouldn’t stay.
One thing I had learned in my study of the world away from school was that men seemed to take credit for success, even when it happened by accident. They did not immediately point out their own mistakes. My mother knew the truth, of course, and I suspect my father did too, but Elaine Bronson and David Wilson were convinced I was shrewder than I appeared.
My first job when I got to Newnham would be to persuade Mrs. Gooder to let me keep a car there and to give me time off to ride in the final race of the season at Chepstow.
19.
Respectable Jones
You would like to go where?” asked Mrs. Gooder.
I had explained that I needed a favor. I knew that it was not necessarily a good start to turn up at the university of your dreams and immediately ask for a day off.
“The thing is . . .” I started.
“Please, my dear,” said Mrs. Gooder, “let’s try not to start any sentence with ‘the thing is.’ I don’t think you’ll find that any of the great writers lean on that phrase as a literary frame. You can do better.”
“It’s the last race of the season,” I said, a hint of desperation in my voice. “And I need to win it, otherwise Lydia Pearce is going to beat me, and I got beaten last year in the very last race, and I don’t want it to happen again, and Uncle Toby says I can ride a horse for him called Respectable Jones at Chepstow, and I might win my weight in champagne, and I promise I’ll mention Newnham if I do and . . .”
Mrs. Gooder raised her hand.
“Take a breath, please. You and I shall make a deal. There is one page in the newspaper that I do not understand and, if you promise that you will explain this to me, you may ride at Chepstow.”
She opened a copy of the Guardian to the racing page and gestured.
“Might as well be gobbledegook. I do not like to feel ignorant.”
I nodded solemnly.
“I promise. Thank-you so much. Thank-you, thank-you, thank-you.”
“One thank-you is enough,” said Mrs. Gooder. “Any more and you rather start to lose the impact. Now go, before I change my mind.”
She waved me toward the door and then added, as an afterthought, “While you are there, you might like to read Wordsworth’s lines on Tintern Abbey. I think you’ll find it’s not far from Chepstow.”
As I shut the door, I could hear Mrs. Gooder reciting to herself, “Five years have past; five summers, with the length/ Of five long win
ters.”
I had to pace myself that first week of term, because I didn’t want to put on too much weight. It wasn’t easy, as there was a “squash” every night. The first week of any university year is like the January sales, with each society playing the part of the big department stores and the first-year students, known as freshers, being the gullible shoppers.
Posing in alphabetical order for our matriculation photo, I had made friends with the girl standing next to me, Louise Arter, who was reading modern languages. We decided we would explore Cambridge together by way of whatever squash we could get into. Each one offered a free glass of something and hoped to get you tipsy enough to sign up straight away and pay a year’s dues.
We went to the Newnham College Boat Club squash and both signed up for the novice boat; we went to the Union Society and both joined the Debating Society; we went to the Wine Society, the Cheese Society, the Film Society and the Cricket Society. We walked into the Tiddlywinks Society squash at Queen’s College but decided that they looked a little too intense for us. The Beagling Society were a fun bunch, but we didn’t join. I felt a little guilty that we raided the free wine at the Christian Society and left without even having a conversation, let alone a conversion.
How anyone gets any academic work done in the first term of university is beyond me. It was a whirl. Any friend network that we had from school was busted. The two other girls from my school year who had gotten in to Cambridge were one or two years ahead of me and, although I knew of other people, the links were as fragile as candy floss. Louise and I embarked upon our adventure with open minds. We would be friends with anyone who seemed fun, chatty and didn’t take themselves too seriously.
My self-preservation streak always kicked in just before midnight, when I would drag Louise away and we would head back to Newnham before the porter locked the main door. You could get in after midnight, but it involved ringing the doorbell and looking ashamed as the porter made a big show of getting out his keys and granting you entrance, while staring suspiciously.
My Animals and Other Family Page 26