It is dark by the time we walk through the garden gate and I can barely put one foot in front of the other.
‘Come on, Clarey,’ says Andrew. ‘You can have a cup of tea in a minute.’
We burst through the playroom door to find Toby and Flora watching cartoons.
‘We walked all the way home from lunch!’ I announce, proud as Punch that we’ve done it.
Flora turns to assess us. After a beat she says, ‘Why?’
‘Why indeed?’ my feet reply.
We walked because we never had done, because it was an adventure, and because we had time on our side. We walked because it’s the simplest, most natural thing to do. We walked because, like breathing and rational thought, it makes us human.
We walked because my brother has never wanted to leave home and because I wanted to come home. We may have different sides, but we are the same coin.
3
I’ve always liked Ireland. Andrew and I had an Irish nanny called Liz who took us there on holiday when we were about ten and eight. We loved its essential messiness. It didn’t matter if we got muddy or grazed or ripped our clothes. We could play outside for hours and no one seemed to mind. The general message was ‘Only come back if yer bleedin’ or yer knocked out.’
I never stopped to worry about how we would get back if either of us was knocked out, and carried on taking swipes at my little brother’s head with a broom.
Whenever I walk in Ireland I look at the hedgerows and imagine them as people with mad, wild hair that has never been brushed. The countryside has that air of chaos about it. The roads don’t lead where you think they’re going to lead and the footpaths could take you anywhere.
When Alice and I first got together I took her to Ireland on a short holiday. We started in Dublin, where I wanted her to meet some fabulous friends of mine. They showed us the hot spots of the city, then we headed out into the country to the K Club, a very smart golf club in County Kildare. Alice is a keen golfer and I was trying to impress her. When we got there, I thought it would be good to get a feel of the countryside around the K Club, not just the golf course. So we went for a walk.
I had looked at a map and figured out a route that should have taken us forty-five minutes. An hour later, we were completely lost. I had not brought the map with us and had no signal on my phone to work out where we were, but I refused to panic. After all, Alice may not even have noticed we were lost, even though I was sure we had been past this tree once before. (I tend to survive under the misguided belief that I can ‘feel’ the right way to go. It doesn’t always work.)
After Alice had suggested for the third time that we ask for directions, I followed a signpost to a village in the hope that it might have a pub with people in it. I need not have worried. Every village in Ireland has a pub with people in it.
‘Excuse me,’ I said to a man dragging on a cigarette outside. ‘So sorry to disturb you, but I wondered if you could help us. We’re trying to get to the K Club.’
He looked at us and up into the sky, then back at us, then right and left down the road. He leaned towards us and fixed me with a concentrated stare.
‘The K Club?’ he said.
I nodded.
‘The one where the Ryder Cup was held?’
I nodded again.
‘I know it. Ah yes, I know it.’
We waited, assuming that he was assessing the shortest and most direct route we should take. After a minute he spoke again: ‘Now, you see, if I was trying to get to the K Club, I wouldn’t be starting from here.’
And that was it. No directions, no sense of where on earth we should be starting from, just a shrug of the shoulders and a smile. He ground his cigarette into the pavement and turned.
Being polite, I said earnestly, ‘Understood. Thank you for your time.’
Alice and I waited for him to go into the pub. We looked at each other and exploded with laughter. I wondered if there were other walks we shouldn’t be starting from here.
I checked my phone again and found the flicker of a signal, enough to show us a map. We had turned right when we should’ve turned left and gone a mile in the wrong direction. Once I’d worked out a return route, it didn’t take long and we were back in the comfort of the hotel, where they treated us like royalty.
They love their horses in Ireland, and they embrace anyone who seems to know something about them. Walking through Dublin Airport, I am greeted by cheery faces and the inevitable question, ‘So, Clare, who do you fancy for the Champion Hurdle/Gold Cup/Derby/Grand National?’
They want to know if I’m going to the Dublin Horse Show – which I haven’t yet attended but will do one day – or if I’m over for the races. Usually, I’m en route to filming with a trainer or, in the old days, I would be covering a big race day for the BBC.
The audiences are different, too. Back in about 2001, I was working with Willie Carson at the Curragh for the Irish Derby and a crowd had gathered around us. Their stage-whispered comments reached our ears.
‘Bejasus, it’s true, so it is!’ a woman said to her friend.
‘Would you look at that?’ A father to his son.
‘I always wondered whether he’d grown, but not many people have a growth spurt in their fifties.’ An older gentleman with a pint of Guinness in his hand.
‘He does stand on a box!’ they chorused.
It was always the biggest talking point of our fourteen-year on-air partnership. Did Willie Carson stand on a box? People would ask me every day of the week, and I wondered why it caused such fascination. If they watched the racing for any length of time they would see us move into the paddock, roaming through the assembled trainers and jockeys or standing up close to the horses. I wondered how they never noticed that Willie’s height would suddenly drop when we were out of the studio (it being impractical for him to carry a box around with him).
Of course he stood on a box.
For the benefit of the Curragh crowd, Willie reached down and picked up the magic box. It was a rather smart mini-pedestal, designed to bring his eye level up to mine. I am not, as Wikipedia insists, 6 foot 4 – I am 5 foot 7; but that’s still seven inches taller than Willie. The idea was that he should remain shorter than me but that we wouldn’t be quite so mismatched.
He turned the box over to reveal the plaque underneath. Then he read it out to the crowd: ‘Dear Mr Carson, here’s the extra six inches you asked for.’ He cackled loudly. ‘Makes all the difference!’ he shouted.
I loved working with Willie. He has an infectious enthusiasm for life and a sharp understanding of top-class racing. Willie rode hatfuls of Group 1 winners, won the Derby four times, was Champion Jockey five times, made winning moves at the top level and made mistakes, too. He understands what it is like to operate under pressure, what it feels like to ride a brilliant horse and how things can go wrong. The most important thing is that he can communicate all that to people watching at home.
Lester Piggott may have been more successful, but with the best will in the world, he is not a born conversationalist. Until Frankie Dettori retires from the saddle, I doubt there will be anyone who can bring the world of flat racing alive the way Willie did on TV.
Coincidentally, Willie’s wife, Elaine, was one of the many nannies charged with the task of trying to control my brother and me when we were little. Andrew and I were mad keen on riding, but only one of us believed in stable management. Andrew didn’t have a clue.
‘Turn your pony out when you finish,’ Elaine said.
So Andrew took her at her word and turned his iron-grey fireball Raffles out in the little paddock at the stud. The only problem was that he had neglected to take his tack off first.
‘You didn’t tell me to,’ he said to Elaine. She hadn’t told him to, but she had assumed he might have the intelligence to work it out.
It was hard to understand what, if anything, was going on in my brother’s brain. He had been told to groom his pony, so he did so, reluctantly, but he didn’t fa
ncy carrying the grooming kit back to the tack room. Instead, he put the brown bag around Polly the lurcher’s neck to see if she would carry it for him. Polly wasn’t a donkey and neither was she brave – in fact, she was probably the wettest dog we ever had – but she was very affectionate. The grooming kit started to swing beneath her neck and the drawstring spun round, tightening all the time. Polly yelped and started to panic. The kit tightened again, and she took fright, turning round and running back to the house.
Andrew’s eyes widened as he realized that Dad would discover his idiocy. He sprinted under the archway of the entrance to the stud, up the gravel path past the loading ramp, and into the yard. I had never seen him move so fast, but his chubby little legs were no match for a lean lurcher: by the time he got to the back door of the house, Polly was already there, quivering and whimpering. I arrived not far behind.
Dad was crouched down beside Polly, trying to untangle the grooming kit. He was stroking her head and soothing her as he did so. Andrew stopped a few feet away, trying to figure out what to do. The grooming kit came off and Polly disappeared into the house, her tail clamped down between her legs and her neck bruised. Dad lifted the grooming kit off the ground.
‘Whose is this?’
In the same situation, I would have pretended it wasn’t mine. But it had ‘Andrew’ emblazoned on the side of it, so that wasn’t an option for my backward little brother. His face was crimson with fear and athletic effort, and his mouth was opening and closing like that of a fish. My father was white with rage. Cruelty to animals was a sin above all others in his eyes. Even my kleptomania, which got me suspended from school, was not as bad as this.
Andrew was still speechless, so I stepped in front of him.
‘It wasn’t his fault,’ I said. ‘He didn’t mean to hurt her. He just wanted her to carry his bag. Didn’t you?’
I looked round at Andrew, whose mouth was still silently opening and shutting. He nodded his head and burst into tears.
‘Well, next time, carry your own bloody bag,’ my father said, as angry as I’d ever seen him. ‘Now get to your room, and stay there.’
An hour later, I went up to check on Andrew. He was lying in bed, his face buried in the pillow. I took Polly with me. She wagged her tail and pushed her long nose under his chin. She had forgiven him, and that was all that mattered. My father told Elaine to keep an eye on Andrew.
‘He’s either stupid or lazy, or both,’ he pronounced. ‘Gormless boy.’
‘Gormless’ was my father’s favourite word for Andrew. Once, when we were skiing in Zermatt, in the shadow of the Matterhorn, we christened Andrew ‘The Mattergorm’. I think that would be quite a good name for a racehorse.
I doubt that looking after us was Elaine’s most beloved job, but by the time she married Willie Carson she seemed to have forgiven us the sins we had committed. Willie was always Andrew’s favourite jockey, and he would try to imitate the head-down, arms-pumping style of his hero. His attempts were very realistic, but the downside was that he could never see where he was going.
‘Get back on the gallop!’ Dad would shout, as Andrew careered off track at a 45-degree angle.
Willie’s last Derby win, on Erhaab in 1994, was the very first I covered for the then nascent BBC Radio 5 Live. It was a sensational ride: he forged a path through on the rail to make ground late and fast then switched to the middle of the course to come round Colonel Collins and King’s Theatre and arrived there with so much momentum he could afford to ease up in the last couple of strides.
He had won the Derby at the age of fifty-one, and I honestly believe that his confidence in the horse and his knowledge of the crazy undulations of Epsom racecourse made all the difference.
I remember him running towards me screaming, as I held my BBC microphone out.
‘Yeaaahhh!’ he shouted. ‘Wasn’t that brilliant?’
He was so high on elation that he rattled on for five minutes without drawing breath. It was one of the best winning interviews I have ever done and I barely had to ask a question.
Two years later, in September 1996, Willie got kicked horribly as he was trying to get on a horse in the paddock at Newbury. He was thrown fifteen feet and suffered lacerations to his liver. He made a full recovery but, in the following spring, he announced his retirement from race riding, at the age of fifty-four. Julian Wilson, who presented the BBC’s racing coverage, was quick off the mark in persuading Willie that a career in television would suit him. He had been a captain on Question of Sport in the 1980s and was one of the few racing faces recognized by people in the street. It was an inspired appointment, and when Julian retired in 1998 Willie and I became the BBC’s racing double act.
I enjoyed the unpredictability of working with Willie. I had to concentrate extra hard to ensure that if he made a mistake I knew enough to correct it, and I loved the strange nature of our on-air partnership. You don’t often get a male–female combination in which the younger woman is leading the presentation, and rarely do they have as much fun as we did. We laughed all the time, on air and off.
Willie’s talent was not appreciated enough by the racing press. Yes, he may have lacked a little microphone discipline and occasionally got his words jumbled up, but he could leap through the screen into the viewer’s home and make them feel involved. That is a rare skill.
I loved covering racing and I had adored growing up in a racing yard but, as I reached my thirties, I was starting to realize how small my world had been. The key to broadening my horizons was walking.
My knowledge of Ireland and Northern Ireland had been limited to Leopardstown, the Curragh, the K Club and Down Royal in the north until I started walking there. What an experience! From the Giant’s Causeway, to the Mountains of Mourne in Northern Ireland, to the Wicklow Mountains, Mullaghmore Head in County Sligo and the Ballybunion Cliff Walk in County Kerry, there are a multitude of exhilarating paths to choose.
There is a quality of green in Ireland that you don’t see in other countries – the benefit, I suppose, of an annual rainfall that averages at 100cm – deep, lush, verdant grass and hedgerows brimming over with growth. That grass is one of the reasons there are so many good horses bred in Ireland.
In January 2012 I joined what has become Northern Ireland’s biggest walking group, the Wee Binnians. There was a frost painting the ground with a layer of icing sugar, the skies were clear and the air was crisp. It was the perfect day for a bracing walk (or scramble) up the side of Slieve Binnian, in County Down.
C. S. Lewis had visited the area, and the Kingdom of Mourne, as it’s known, was apparently the inspiration for Narnia. It’s a mystical, timeless landscape in which you can be utterly lost, with no view of civilization or modernity.
The Wee Binnians group had been set up in 1987 by Veronica McCann, and now had over 250 members. Wee Binnian is one of the smallest peaks in the Mountains of Mourne and, as many of the walkers were beginners, Veronica felt the name accurately reflected their lowly aspirations. The point of the group was, and still is, to welcome walkers of all levels, so there are different grades of walks according to difficulty. But, as seems always to happen with my walks, we hadn’t selected the easy option.
Veronica showed me on the map where we would be walking, and said, in an entirely straightforward manner, ‘Actually, this is going to be my final resting place, so that’ll be my last walk in my life, up here.’ I looked at her to confirm that she was talking about her own death. ‘I’m a strategic woman and, at my time in life, you have to keep making plans. This is where I want my ashes scattered, and Gráinne here is in charge because she’s a fair bit younger than me. Also, I’ll be making sure that my grandchildren stay fit by clambering up here to talk to me.’
We climbed up the steep, stony path and, with the help of the group, who kept me chatting, I reached the top about an hour later. I realized then how desperately unfit I was. Veronica, seventy-two, was sprinting ahead of me like a mountain goat and was already sitting against a
rock with her tea, sandwiches and, crucially, hot port.
From the top, we could see miles to the west and north to Northern Ireland, south along the coast of Ireland and, to the east, all the way across to the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea. I told Veronica she’d picked a fine resting place. One of the group started singing ‘Lily of the West’, and the others told me how they’d joined up, where they’d walked, the friendships they’d made and the romances that had formed. A few couples had ended up marrying each other, and ‘Baby Binnians’ had been born. They told me how Veronica had inspired them with her determination and her ability to make everyone feel welcome.
‘With my working life, it was essential for me to come out walking,’ Veronica said. ‘Once I’m in the hills, I feel I have space to have fun and space to think. It’s amazing to have been involved with the club for twenty-five years.’
I had assumed that the descent from Slieve Binnian would be easier than the ascent. After I’d fallen over twice and picked up boggy smears all over my backside, I realized my error. One of the members gave me two poles and told me to slow down. He walked in front of me and suggested I follow in his footsteps. I slipped a few times more, but I didn’t fall again.
I understood then the spirit of the group. They look out for each other, and they look forward to their ascents every week and cover each other’s backsides on their descents. I rang home and told Alice I wanted to live in the Kingdom of Mourne.
‘It sounds lovely,’ she said. ‘When’s your flight home?’
I’ve had many memorable walks in Ireland, with many great people, but the best walking companion in the land has to be the botanist and broadcaster Éanna Ní Lamhna.
The first time we met she promised me a 6- or 7-mile walk in the Wicklow Mountains. She lied about the distance (it was at least double that) and told me that all the climbing was at the beginning, which was also a complete lie. But the experience was one I will never forget.
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