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Chapter 1

A New Life in Devon

Most people plan their lives. They choose the area in which they live because it’s close to where they work, or to good schools for their kids, or because they’ll be near family and friends. They plan their careers, buy houses they can afford based on their salaries, and even book their annual holidays in advance. My husband Michael and I have never operated that way. More or less everything that has happened to us over the last twenty years has been the result of coincidence, or a reaction to circumstances. It has often felt as if we were being propelled in a certain direction and we just went with the flow. Perhaps the most significant feature of the Great-wood story is that it simply evolved.

For instance, we moved to Devon in 1993 largely because of an idyllic fishing trip. It was a hot day in June, the lazy river glinted in the sunlight and a wildflower meadow stretched into the distance. The only sound was the buzzing of insects and my father sucking on his pipe. I don’t fish myself but the beauty of the landscape was so intoxicating that I turned to Michael and said, ‘We should move down here.’

At the time we lived in the Cotswolds, where we ran a small hotel. While it was rewarding at first, we’d been getting fed up with the relentless drudgery, and an inheritance from Michael’s Aunt Gladys meant we could afford to change direction. Michael loved to write and had been working for a couple of years on a children’s story, which I had illustrated. If we sold our hotel in the Cotswolds and bought a place in Devon, we’d have enough money in the bank to keep us going for a couple of years until we decided what we wanted to do with our lives. And if we found a big enough place, Michael’s elderly and increasingly frail mother could live in an annex, where we could keep an eye on her.

My reverie was interrupted by a yell, followed by a loud braying sound. Dad had lifted his fishing line out of the water and flicked it backwards in a long, languid cast. Michael shouted too late to warn him that some heifers had sidled up behind us and a cow complained loudly as it was hooked solidly in the rump. The heifers charged off across the field, dragging Dad’s reel behind them, and we all chased after them like the cast of a Laurel and Hardy movie, with Michael and me trying to grab the recalcitrant cow and hold it still long enough for Dad to extricate his hook.

It was a warning of things to come, a message about the trouble animals can bring into your life. Maybe we should have listened. But we didn’t.

After much searching, we found a house we both liked, near Dartmoor. What sold it to us was a stunning five-foot-wide solid oak door with iron studding, which led into a small porch with oak seating and a tiny room above with a diamond-paned window. The door and the porch were probably worth more than the rest of the house and the garden put together. The property was surrounded by fields on all sides, and there were several outbuildings we could renovate. That was the good news. The downside was the carnage left by previous attempts at modernisation: concrete floors, orange and green painted beams, and the obligatory 1970s avocado bathroom suite. Undeterred, we moved in, along with our four Jack Russells, and began to do it up to our own taste, sourcing original Devon slate for the floors and ripping out the ancient plumbing.

The barns were over-run by cats and kittens, some of them feral, all in pretty bad shape. Michael’s daughter Clare (one of his five grown-up children) had come to help, so she and I set about rounding up these cats in order to take them to the Cat Protection League, where they could be spayed, wormed and eventually re-homed. We caught fifteen of them altogether, and ended up covered in scratches and bites, but we knew they would have a much better future with the charity than they would have had in our barns, where they were interbreeding and relying on whatever food they could catch. And we were better off without them as well, we mused, as we applied antiseptic and bandages to our wounds.

However, Michael and I are animal lovers. I grew up on a farm in Wiltshire and Michael had previously owned racehorses, so animals have always been a part of our lives. Once we found ourselves in a country setting with barns and fields, it was only a matter of time before we started filling them. Nature abhors a vacuum, so they say.

Walking down a lane near the house one day, Michael and I heard a pathetic bleating sound and peered under a hedge to see a goat tethered to a trailer. She was white, with pricked ears, and her rope had become tangled round the wheels of the trailer so she couldn’t reach her water bucket. Our neighbour, George, appeared round the corner.

‘Is that your goat?’ I asked.

‘Bloody nuisance, she is,’ he exclaimed. ‘My daughter brought her home, but unless we keep her tied up she runs off and eats everything she can reach in the garden, and some of the plants are poisonous. She seems to have some sort of homing device because every time my wife plants something a bit special, she immediately finds and demolishes it.’

I knew nothing at all about goats but I felt this one deserved more of a life than she had at present, grazing on a bare patch of earth and weeds attached to a rope that was just a few feet long.

‘I’ll probably have to send her to market,’ George added.

Michael and I looked at each other. There was something about this funny little goat that captivated me. As I watched her try to unwind the tangled tether she gazed up at me with an anxious bleat, asking me to help. She seemed quite smart. ‘I think she’s great, but it’s a shame she can’t enjoy a bit of freedom.’

Michael glanced at me with a weary expression. He knew what was coming.

‘She should be able to run around instead of being tied up.’

George raised an eyebrow, clearly deciding that we were ‘up-country’ folk with romanticised rural notions who might just be stupid enough to take on this troublesome creature. By this time I’d made my way through the hedge and was stroking the goat’s head.

‘I s’pose I could let you have her, if you want,’ he mused. ‘Course she did cost us a bit o’ money. ’Spect you wouldn’t mind giving us a tenner to make up for the loss.’

Michael reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out a crumpled tenner, and George untethered the goat, whose name, it transpired, was Angie, and handed me the rope.

‘There you go,’ he said, and I think we caught the sound of a cackle as he disappeared off down the lane.

We looked at Angie and she looked up at us expectantly, then we took her down to her new home, where she lost no time in befriending the dogs. In fact, before long she was behaving just like a dog: coming when we called her name, joining us all for walks, and wandering into the house when she felt like it. She stole bread in the kitchen if we were foolish enough to leave it lying out, and she was even found upstairs in the bedroom a few times, nosing about amongst my clothes.

Next we decided we really should have a few hens – just enough to provide us with fresh eggs. We went to a livestock auction in Hatherleigh, the nearest village, but our lack of experience at auctions such as these told against us and we kept accidentally buying the scrawny, pecked hen in the cage next to the white silky one we’d had our eye on. Just the slightest twitch of the hand and I found myself the not-so-proud owner of yet another straggly specimen. Once the hammer had gone down, it was far too late to admit that I had bid for the wrong hen. Thereafter it was a little disconcerting to realise that the auctioneer always looked across at me when a particularly bedraggled specimen was held up to auction, waiting for my bid.

Flirty Gertie was definitely an accidental purchase. She was one of the ugliest hens you’ve ever seen, with dull grey feathers, a damaged eye and an extremely loud voice, especially if anything didn’t meet her approval. She didn’t lay eggs on a regular basis but she liked human contact and would always rush up to greet us, and she was happy to be lifted and cuddled. One of her special talents was stowing away in the back of the Land Rover when we were going out. Once, when Michael was in a bakery in Jacobstowe, he looked out the window to see Flirty Gertie holding up traffic as she pecked in the road outside, having hopped out of the back of the vehicle. Another time, she appeared in the churchyard as we were emerging from a service and it took most of the congregation chasing around in their Sunday-best clothes to recapture her. She was finally trapped in the church porch by the organist’s wife, who expertly hurled her best Sunday hat in such a way that it covered Gertie almost completely, and we could pick her up with relative ease.

So we had four dogs, umpteen scruffy hens, a goat and Michael’s mother all living with us. Michael’s children frequently came to visit, and we settled down to enjoy life in our new home. At no time had we ever discussed getting horses. We’d both grown up with horses and loved them but we knew what a huge commitment they required, in terms of both time and money. But then we met a woman called Pam in the local pub. She had bred horses all her life and had a yearling for which she was keen to find a home.

‘We’ll come and have a look,’ I said, ‘but only out of curiosity. We need a horse like we need a hole in the head.’

Poppy was a chestnut filly with huge brown eyes and a white blaze down her face. She had a wild, feisty expression and there was something about her that made me cautious. She was pretty but she was going to take some work. Was this really something I wanted to take on?

‘I think we should have her. How much do you want for her?’ Michael asked, and I turned to him, open-mouthed in disbelief. Whatever happened to discussion and consensus?

I realised my instincts about Poppy were correct as soon as we got her home, when she bolted out of the trailer. As I was attempting to lead her into the field we both ricocheted up the lane from one side to the other. She was clearly wilful and hadn’t had a lot of handling and, as I had originally suspected, it would probably take a while to teach her some manners. We had problems every time we moved her from barn to field and back again, but I’d had a lot of experience in dealing with youngsters and because she was quick and clever she soon began to understand the ground rules. However, she had a temper if things didn’t go her way, and we had many a battle of wills.

I have never liked to see animals on their own, and Poppy needed some company. On a hunch, I decided to put Angie the goat in the same field to see how they got on, and after a bit of mutual sniffing and nudging, they became instant best pals. Angie showed Poppy how to clamber up steep banks to eat blackberries from the bush. It was fascinating watching a horse delicately pluck a ripe fruit from its bed of thorns. Their mouths aren’t precise enough and she got a few scratches on her nose but that didn’t seem to deter her. The two quickly became inseparable and, ironically, the goat who used to give George so much trouble that he kept her tethered to a trailer was able to help teach our wilful horse some manners.

Despite my initial reservations about keeping horses, Poppy rekindled my childhood love of them. I’d ridden from the age of four, and had my first racehorse at the age of seven on Dad’s farm. We’d taken in a lot of racehorses that were retired from the racecourse and I knew how stunning these fabulous creatures were, and how exhilarating and rewarding they could be. Poppy was too young to be ridden for another couple of years, so when Michael and I were offered a retired racehorse called Jelly, we thought it might be a good idea. She’d be equine company for Poppy to help in her socialisation and, what’s more, I’d be able to ride her. At least that was the idea.

When Jelly arrived, she was a reminder that things seldom go according to plan when it comes to animals. She hated being groomed, hated having her rug changed, and would shuffle and back me into a corner of the stable whenever I attempted to touch her. She was incorrigibly bloody-minded. Not only was she awkward and grumpy, but she was also a chronic crib-biter. ‘Cribbing’ is when a horse places its upper teeth on a post, arches its neck and swallows air. It is believed that this releases endorphins in the brain that help relieve stress, but horses that crib-bite fill their stomachs with air, are less likely to put on weight and have a tendency to colic. It’s highly addictive and once a horse starts doing it, you’re unlikely to be able to stop it. What’s more, it wrecks your fencing.

Whenever I took Jelly out for a hack, more often than not she would catch me unawares and dump me unceremoniously in a ditch or on top of a hedge, for no other reason except wilfulness. I would then have to wander wearily after her to try to catch her. More often than not I failed, and I’d return home to find her waiting outside her field, keen to be reunited with her pals.

‘It’s rotten luck that we’ve acquired such a bad-tempered, ungrateful mare,’ I commented to Michael. ‘She hates me and everything I try to do for her.’

‘Oh, she’s all right,’ he said. He seemed to have a soft spot for her and I couldn’t understand why.

‘Well, you muck her out and groom her every day then,’ I retorted. Michael and I don’t often argue but there are times when there is a palpable tension in the air and this was definitely one of them.

There wasn’t a specific moment when Jelly and I turned the corner, but gradually, over the next few months, she began to make me chuckle instead of frown. Every morning when I took in her breakfast, she pulled her ears back, rolled her eyes and made a horrendous face at me, but I learned to take it in my stride. ‘Same to you with knobs on,’ I’d retort. If she lifted a leg to kick me, I made a loud tutting noise and she’d stop and give me a resigned look as if to say, ‘Oh, all right, get on with whatever you have to do. Just do it as quickly as you can.’ We weren’t going to be best friends but she had decided she might as well tolerate me.

The next addition to our growing menagerie was an Angora goat called Monty, who became fast friends with Angie, and then Michael was offered a beautiful liver chestnut racehorse called Chic, who had recently been retired. She was gentle and kind – in fact, everything that Jelly was not. So there we were with four dogs, lots of scrawny chickens, two goats and three horses. It felt right to me. Despite all the work, I liked having animals around.

We were still having endless discussions about what to do with the next part of our lives. Should we convert more of the outbuildings and take in paying guests, as we had done in the Cotswolds hotel? The animals would be a unique selling point for the right kind of visitor seeking not exactly a peaceful retreat but an entertaining break amongst animals that were all strong individual characters.

The problem with this idea was that we hadn’t yet finished the renovations on the house and they were swallowing money at an alarming rate. The front door was virtually the only thing that worked properly. Making the rest of the house habitable was proving to be much more expensive than we had anticipated. Even though we were doing a lot of the work ourselves, hitherto unforeseen problems kept cropping up and resolving them made a huge hole in the budget.

Besides, did I really want to be a hotelkeeper again?

‘Helen, you’re happier around horses than you are around people,’ Michael commented, and I had to admit he was right. Maybe that was the direction to take.

Michael and I followed racing avidly, and we decided that breeding a small number of foals from selected mares, then training them before selling them to the right home, would be an interesting and rewarding project. We were off to a good start. The highest classes of racehorse are Groups 1, 2 and 3, and the ones we had already were bred from Group 2 winners.

Michael mentioned that he’d recently had a conversation with a local farmer who was trying to sell three ex-racehorses which were in foal to a stallion that was quite popular at the time. ‘Why don’t we just pop along for a quick look?’ he suggested. ‘Just for research purposes.’

Of course, any dog lover knows that you never go along to have a ‘quick look’ at a litter of puppies and come home empty-handed. The same goes for horse lovers and stud farms. And so it was that we came home with three in-foal mares, each with foals at foot. That made a grand total of six horses and three foals, with more on the way. We were running out of space and had to rent another field to accommodate them.

Meanwhile, our cash flow was beginning to look a bit ropey with all these mouths to feed. ‘Why not take on some kayed lambs?’ my father suggested. He was a down-to-earth, Yorkshire-born man who didn’t suffer fools, and he knew all there was to know about farming, so we followed his advice.

Kayed lambs are orphaned ones that can be purchased relatively cheaply, which can then be reared and sold at a profit. They’d have the added benefit of keeping the pasture in good condition. So we bought twelve lambs, rigged up a bottle-feeding system in one of the barns, and once again recruited Michael’s daughter Clare to help.

By now our lives were completely full with feeding and caring for the ever-expanding range of livestock, and scraping old paint from woodwork in our spare time. I scarcely ever had time to go out for a ride, or to walk along the pretty lanes and admire the wildflowers growing in the hedgerows. One sunny day I stood back and remembered why we had come to Devon in the first place: to enjoy its beauty, to relax and decide where we were going next, to take a bit of time out. Whatever had happened to that idea?

All the same, when I opened the door at five in the morning and walked across the yard to boil up a huge vat of barley for the feed, I often found myself humming under my breath. This was a whole lot more satisfying than making fried eggs and two rashers for human guests. It may have been unplanned, but I was blissfully happy with our unpredictable, unruly menagerie.