My Animals and Other Family

by Clare Balding

  When the time inevitably came for Valkyrie, who, let’s not forget, was a stately older lady when she first came to us, to be eased into gentle retirement, I would like to say I was distraught. I would like to think that I wept into her mane and thanked her for the years of delight she had given me. I would love to suggest that I visited her every day to check her sweet-itch and her laminitis and that I cared for her until the end of her days.

  But I didn’t. I was like a magpie moving from one shiny thing to another, brighter, shinier one. A horse trailer arrived one morning from Dorset and the prettiest, whitest pony I had ever seen came down the ramp into our yard.

  “Is he mine?” I asked my mother.

  “He is for now,” she said. “He’s called Volcano, and he’s a Welsh Mountain.”

  He looked different from Valkyrie and Percy. Shetland ponies are small, woolly and hardy. They tend to be between 28 and 40 inches tall or, in horse language, between 7 and 10 hands high. Volcano was much finer, he was taller, his coat seemed thinner and he was so white he practically dazzled. If Shetland ponies were the equivalent of a fluffy, woolly sweater, Volcano was cashmere.

  Horses and ponies are always measured in hands, and the reason is simple: it’s the easiest way for dealers to be certain a person is not lying about the height of the horse they are selling. A flighty young animal won’t stand still long enough to allow itself to be measured with a ruler or a tape, but you can measure it with your hands even if it is moving.

  Hold your hand out in front of you, flat. From the outside of your thumb to the outside of your little finger will be approximately four inches. Henry VIII standardized it as a measurement in 1541. It’s quite fun to measure by walking your hands, one after the other, up and down or across a surface. The desk I am sitting at is 10 hands wide.

  My new pony, Volcano, was 12.2 hands high. That’s quite tall. He was certainly taller than me at his withers, the bone that sits between the shoulder blades, at the base of the neck. It’s the highest nonvariable point of the skeleton, so I am told, which is why it’s the measuring point for ponies, horses and dogs. The head can move up and down, so there’s no point measuring there; the withers cannot.

  The Welsh Mountain pony is a survivor. Henry VIII, shortly before he made sure that all hands were four inches in span, ordered the destruction of all stallions below fifteen hands and all mares below thirteen hands. He was worried that England’s war horses were becoming puny little things because of cross-breeding with Arabs, which are designed for endurance but are rather dainty and fine boned.

  The 1535 Breed of Horses Act was a brutal decree, and many small horses were destroyed. Tough little ponies and horses fled to the higher ground to escape the cull, where they survived in the most extreme weather conditions. The Welsh Mountain pony was one such breed which survived and, in the centuries that followed, it was ridden, took its owners to church in a trap and even pulled plows. These ponies can lug great weights, which is why so many were used in Wales as pit ponies, dragging huge cartloads of coal below ground and in the open air.

  My Welsh Mountain did not look like a pit pony or a farmer’s plow horse. He looked more like an Arab pony, with a slightly dish face and long, dark eyelashes, which he fluttered for effect. Volcano had been ridden by a girl eight years older than me, who had won rosettes galore on him in the show ring. He was adept at hiding his faults and showing off his assets to imaginary judges. He was a “show pony,” with all the beauty but also all the faults that entails. He would teach me that looks weren’t everything.

  ~

  Andrew and I were kept away from the racing yard as much as possible. We lived up on the hill, and our ponies were kept separately from the racehorses so that they could not bring disease into the yard. Racehorses are flighty creatures who will spook at the strangest things—a shadow, a piece of paper or a little pony—so mixing with them wasn’t worth the risk. Besides, my father was busy and we were not to disturb his concentration by riding with the string or wandering through the yard.

  “Would you listen? This is important,” my father would say to his secretary, or my mother, or Bertie.

  He was always in a rush, so other people had to work to his timetable and, if he had graced you with his attention, you had to listen. I remember a discussion with a girl on the way back from school: “My father’s very important,” I said, with confidence.

  “Why on earth do you think that your father is any more important than anyone else’s?” came the offended tone of the girl’s mother, who was driving us, and clearly thought I was in danger of rising above my station.

  “Because he is always saying things that are important.” I made sure the volume was turned up as well as the emphasis on “important.”

  He was certainly too important and too busy to take much of an interest in my new pony, but I was enthralled. Volcano was so white and so pretty that I felt under pressure to keep him looking perfect. The trouble with gray ponies is that your work is never done. No wonder my mother has always believed white to be impractical. Gray ponies are the hardest work in the world. Every day is Fairy Liquid day.

  Soon after he arrived, Volcano managed to cover his hind legs in muck. There was a large brown stain on his backside where he had been lying down in his own droppings, and I decided that I would deal with it. A large bucket of soapy water, a sponge and a wet brush were my instruments of choice, and I got to work. For ease of access and because I was too lazy to do otherwise, I tied his rope around the top of the outside tap.

  Volcano stood quite happily as I scrubbed away at his bottom, at his tummy and then at his neck. I thought I’d make a complete job of it and, when I’d finished washing, I realized that his mane and tail looked a bit long and untidy.

  The first rule that you learn about grooming ponies and horses is that a mane must never be cut, it must be pulled. This is quite a complicated procedure involving a mane comb and lots of tugging. I didn’t really understand why I couldn’t just trim the mane like the hairdresser did my hair. So that’s what I did.

  I chopped merrily away, singing to myself and feeling proud that I was cutting Volcano’s mane in such a straight line. Then I moved to his tail, which I thought would look much better if I trimmed it at the top so that it was thinner and then flowed out to a full tail at the bottom. I had seen this look in Horse & Hound, and I knew exactly what I wanted to create.

  I stood back to admire my handiwork and noticed that the line I thought was straight was crooked, so I went back to work on his mane. Then I looked at his tail again and it looked all jagged and ugly, so I kept trimming.

  I had been hard at work for nearly an hour when my mother appeared. Volcano had been getting a bit bored during this final tidying-up process and was increasingly restless. He pulled back on his rope and, as he felt the resistance, pulled even harder. I tried to grab at the rope, but it was too late. He heaved backward so hard that he pulled the tap clean off the wall.

  Water was gushing everywhere, my mother was shouting at me and Volcano was trotting off down the hill, a dismembered tap dangling off the end of his rope, his mane and tail looking as if they had been attacked by a David Bowie fan paying homage to Ziggy Stardust.

  I threw myself at the tap, trying to stop the whoosh of water by laying my body over the open pipe, but it seemed to make it worse. My mother had disappeared. I was shouting for Andrew to come and help me, but he was sensibly staying as far away from this mess as he could.

  The water suddenly stopped, and Mum walked out of the tack room.

  “I’ve turned it off at the mains,” she said. “Now would you like to explain to me exactly what you’ve been doing?”

  She was using her quiet voice. The one that meant she was very angry. This was wrong. All kinds of wrong.

  “I was making Volcano look pretty.” I decided just to stick to the facts, keep cool and hold my ground. I could see that he w
as eating grass on the side of the hill and played for an exit strategy.

  “I really must catch him,” I said, knowing that distraction might be my only chance of defense. “I would be upset if he got any grass stains. I’ve washed him, you see. All over.”

  “So I observe,” said my mother slowly. “And what exactly have you done to his mane? And his tail?”

  I was walking steadily away from her at this point, toward Volcano and relative safety.

  “I’ve tidied his hair up. It was a mess.”

  As I approached Volcano and picked up the rope, still attached to the tap, I could see my handiwork as a whole for the first time. Up close, it is so hard to judge what you’re doing. Artists must find this all the time—they are painting sections, and it’s only when they stand back and take in the whole work of art that they can judge whether they have created a masterpiece.

  I made an “O” shape with my mouth, but I’m not sure the word came out.

  My eyes felt as if they were being pricked from behind as it dawned on me that I had not made him look good at all. In fact, I had ruined him. If my mother had been going to get cross, she stopped herself as soon as she saw my face.

  My crest was utterly fallen. Even Volcano seemed to know, without looking in a mirror, that his sheen had disappeared. His self-confidence was shattered and he trudged back alongside me to his stall, where he took himself to the far corner and stood with his head facing the wall.

  Andrew was standing by the box door.

  “He looks funny,” he said.

  We were going to our first show the next day; the timing of this compounded the humiliation. My mother told me there was no point in entering any of the classes that were judged on tack and turnout, so I would have to just do the gymkhana classes.

  It was the annual Kingsclere show, organized by a Mrs. Snook. It took place in a field at the back of the roundabout where the bypass would soon be built to divert traffic from our village high street. A week earlier, my mother had taken me to Calcutt & Sons, where tack and horsey clothes were bought and sold. I was always a little nervous of Calcutt’s, because you had to ring a bell before the door was opened, as if you were going into someone’s house, and the man who ran the shop looked at me suspiciously all the time, as if I was going to steal something.

  My mother took me straight to the room that housed second-hand clothes. She pulled out four or five jackets that looked roughly the right size and made me try them on. How they looked was not as important as how much they cost, so it took a while to find one that was not “a complete rip-off.” She bought rugs and boots and a grooming kit for the horses that were brand new, but for us, used was best.

  Of course, the jacket would look better in a year or so, when I grew into it, but as I admired myself in the mirror, turning up the sleeves so they didn’t hang below my hands, and pretending to sit so that I could see what I would look like on Volcano, I thought I had never looked finer. It’s amazing how much happiness can spring forth from the purchase of one secondhand tweed hacking jacket.

  To make up for the hairdressing debacle, I made an extra-special effort to look smart for the show. My father is a manic cleaner of boots. He cleans them so that he can see his reflection in the leather and because, he told me, in his “important voice,” “There’s no point doing something unless you’re going to do it well.”

  My arms got tired with the effort of it all, I struggled with the instruction to spit and polish, and I got brown boot cream all over my sweater, but Dad said, “Not bad for a first effort, not bad at all,” and smiled at me.

  I felt better.

  Before I went to bed I laid out my jodhpur boots, my jodhpurs, a smart white shirt and my new hacking jacket. I left my curtains open so that I would wake up when the sunlight came through the window and, sure enough, I slid off the top bunk before anyone else was awake.

  I pulled on my smart cream jodhpurs, my gleaming boots, my white shirt and my jacket. I didn’t know how to put on a tie, so I stuffed that in my pocket and ran downstairs. The dogs woke up and immediately wanted to be let out, so I headed out to our stables on top of the hill, with two boxers and two lurchers, even before the lads in the yards at Park House down in the valley were feeding the racehorses.

  Volcano was still asleep in his stall, lying down with his head stuffed between his front leg and his tummy. He looked like a swan with its head tucked under one wing. Unfortunately, I could see that, once again, he had chosen to lie with his backside in his own droppings.

  I tried to ignore the state of his mane and tail as I got him up and started the cleaning process all over again. As far as Volcano was concerned, this was quite a successful attempt at removing dirt. As for me, it was a disaster. My clean, perfectly pressed outfit was now covered in white hair, dirt and manure.

  First lesson of going to a competition: don’t put on your smart outfit until the last minute. It’s a bit like presenting on TV. When it comes to Royal Ascot, I don’t even sit down in the clothes I am going to wear on air—I wait until half an hour before the program starts, slip them on in the toilet and take them straight off again as soon as I’ve been counted off air. I learned that trick in 1978, on the day of the Kingsclere Show.

  After breakfast, Mum showed me how to load Volcano onto the horse trailer. We put the ramp down on the side of a hill so that it wasn’t too steep for him to walk in. Mum told me to be firm with him but not to tug. Walk alongside him, rather than ahead of him, she advised, and keep talking to him all the time. He didn’t need a lot of encouragement. I’d put a tail bandage on to protect what was left of his tail, in case he rubbed it, and I’d put boots on his legs. Even though we were only going about three miles down the road, I thought it was important to do it properly.

  Then we piled into the front of the horse trailer—me, Andrew, Mum, Candy and Flossy. The lurchers stayed at home, because they don’t really like social occasions and they hated being on the lead. Candy and Flossy sat on the long passenger seat between Andrew and me. They looked more human than we did. They even looked left as we inched out of our drive, as if they were checking for traffic.

  There were thousands of people in horse stalls and trailers at the show, all of whom seemed to know exactly what they were doing. There were three different rings—one with a showing class for children on the leading rein; one with jumps so high I couldn’t imagine how anyone could clear them; and one with a row of poles, a pile of sacks and buckets full of water.

  That would be my ring for the day, the gymkhana ring. Like the word “jodhpur,” “gymkhana” has its etymological roots in India. It means a venue where sporting events take place. It has been adapted in the UK to mean games on horses. Believe me, any game you can think of can be played on a horse.

  I watched older kids galloping headlong up and down the field, picking up handkerchiefs from the floor by flinging themselves sideways and down from the saddle. They looked as if their bodies were made of rubber, as if they had extendable hands.

  I felt a little rush go through my body as I contemplated doing what they were doing. I was a bit scared, but mostly I was thrilled. The gymkhana would be my métier, my calling in life.

  My mother paid £1 to enter me in five classes—the bending race, sack race, egg and spoon race, apple bobbing, and round the world.

  The embarrassment of riding a pony with a mane and tail that looked like Ziggy Stardust’s hair soon evaporated as Volcano and I lined up for the first of our five events. He knew exactly what to do, even if I didn’t. He took off, weaving himself in and out of the bending poles with the expertise of a snake on steroids. I looked across at my closest competitor with two bends to go and gave Volcano an extra squeeze in the belly. He accelerated just enough to ensure that we won.

  There was no time to celebrate, as next up was the sack race. Volcano and I had to gallop to the end of the ring, where I would jump off and in
to a sack, hopping all the way back while I led him. There was a lot of shouting and a fair degree of chaos as children fell over in their sacks, letting their ponies trot off loose, but I kept my focus and Volcano stayed right by my side. I threw myself over the line like a rugby player scoring a try and managed to finish just in front of a boy who had barged me in the collecting ring.

  So the morning went on and, with each race, Volcano and I grew in confidence and trust in each other. We had four red rosettes with “FIRST” written across them. A 100 percent record: four wins out of four.

  “Right, that’ll do,” said my mother.

  “What?” I said.

  “It’s not ‘What?’ it’s ‘I beg your pardon?’” she replied, on automatic response.

  “No, I mean—what?” I was outraged that we should not be going for the clean sweep of gold medals at the Olympics of the Kingsclere pony world.

  “You’ve done very well,” my mother explained. “And yes, I know it would be nice to win all five races, but I don’t think it would be fair. So you are not going to go in the round-the-world race. You have to give someone else a chance.”

  I adopted a look of part confusion, part indignation. “Are you serious?”

  “I have never been more serious,” said my mother. “You can watch from here and cheer on everyone else.”

  Andrew was fingering my rosettes in wonder and saying, “Wow,” forgetting that he was meant to be holding Candy and Flossy. He was in a world of his own as I fought the urge to scream at the unfairness. I picked up the reins and moved away from my mother, cursing her as I did so. At the edge of the ring, I did furious round-the-worlds, spinning around and around my saddle as the final race of the five unfolded in front of me. A little boy called Harry won and was so happy he cried. I should have been flooded by the spirit of generosity, but I wasn’t.