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Chapter 2

Moving to Greatwood Farm

As luck would have it, we had just finished the renovations on the wing of the house that we had converted for Michael’s mother to live in when, sadly, she passed away. Michael and I were left with a rambling property that was far too big for the two of us but didn’t have enough land for all the animals we had acquired. The foals were growing up and needed to be weaned, and the mares would soon be due for foaling. That meant we needed more stables and it became obvious there was never going to be enough room for us all where we were. What’s more, there was a lane between the house and the outbuildings, and passing cars had to screech to a halt if Angie poked her nose through the hedge, or Poppy dragged me out for a walk. And we were overlooked on all sides by neigh-bours, so it wasn’t quite private enough for our taste.

It was a stunning house once we’d done all the renovations, and it was a shame to leave behind all the fruits of our hard labour, but it wasn’t quite right for our needs any more. We took a deep breath, sold up and moved to a new home on a nearby country estate. There we had sufficient outbuildings to stable all the horses, but the hens had to share a little brick outhouse with my deep freeze. Michael’s son Tod was bemused when I sent him to fetch a pack of frozen peas one day and he had to flick off hen droppings before bringing them into the kitchen.

‘I come to you for my fix of antibodies before the return to London life,’ he laughed, but I noticed when I served dinner later that he stared long and hard at his plate before picking up a fork.

Our breeding programme got off to a good start, and I was involved in every aspect of the foals’ upbringing. Often I was the one to check their position when the mare went into labour; one foreleg should emerge first, then the other, then the muzzle. I’d have to make sure the newborn foal could stretch up and reach its mother’s teats to get antibody-containing colostrum within the first few hours. And I’d be there for the first steps outdoors and all the major milestones of its first year of life. I hated letting them go when Newmarket sales came around. They were my babies. It was hard to hand over the responsibility to someone else, but that had been the plan. We hoped that out of our very small breeding operation we might achieve a winner or two. If they did well, that would be great, but if they didn’t we would stop. Whatever happened, we felt we had a responsibility for any life we brought into the world.

Neither Michael nor I are the kind of people who are driven to make a fortune, and it’s just as well. Belief in what we are doing has always been of primary importance, and we tend to make decisions instinctively rather than being guided by commercial logic. We both have strengths that complement the other, and together we usually seem to make the right decisions. But the day Michael went to Ascot sales on his own, with the idea of picking up another one or two well-bred mares, I should have had an inkling that the best-laid plans can go awry. He ended up coming home not with some mares but with a discarded gelding, an ex-hurdler that had never been particularly successful on the racecourse and would have been heading for the abattoir had Michael not stepped in.

‘It’s one thing raising your hand by mistake at a hen sale,’ I said caustically, ‘but to raise it deliberately at a horse sale is something else again.’

‘You would have done the same,’ he told me. ‘Just look at him.’

He was right. I would have.

Charlie was a sad-looking horse, so thin that his backbone was sticking out and we could count all his ribs, and he had the sour smell that we were to learn is characteristic of malnourished animals. What made me angriest when I looked closely was that someone had clipped him to try to smarten him up for the sale, and it must have been horribly uncomfortable for that poor horse to feel clippers running all over his sticking-out bones. It was shameful. We put some spare duvets under his rug to keep him warm, gave him a course of wormers, had him checked out by the vet and fed him carefully. Within three months of receiving this kind of care, he was a completely different horse. He was bay with white socks, good bones and a solid, dependable character. We found he was well trained and once he was healthy enough to be taken out hacking, he turned out to be a lovely horse to ride.

The transformation from the sorry creature Michael had brought home with him to this healthy, intelligent, good-natured animal was dramatic and it made us both furious to think that this young horse – only five years old – would have had no chance of a future. The meat man had actually been bidding against Michael in the auction. Within nine months we had found Charlie a new home where he settled in happily.

The last thing you should do as a breeder is take on ‘charity cases’ that drain your precious resources without contributing to the balance sheet. We kept selling our yearlings, but at the same time we could never walk away from a horse in need. We just didn’t have it in us.

One day we went to buy a new trailer at a farm that was miles from anywhere. In a field nearby, we could see three horses standing around looking dejected. One in particular looked up at us hopefully and within seconds Michael had leapt the fence to go and have a closer look.

‘Uh-oh, this is not good,’ I thought to myself. And I was right. The upshot was that the trailer wasn’t empty when we drove home later that day.

Red was a five-year-old stallion from a leading blood-line and although he wasn’t in terrible condition, he was unsettled because he had been put in a field with some mares and his instinct was to keep trying to mount them. This gave us a problem, of course, because where would we keep him that he wouldn’t be bothered by all our mares? Fortunately I found a knowledgeable horse-woman, Sandra, who lived near us and was happy to let him stay in one of her stables. After a veterinary check-up and a few weeks of intensive care, we found he was a happy and quite beautiful horse, with a deep red sheen to his coat. He didn’t like being turned out into a field for any length of time or he would panic, but he was perfect for our mares, behaved like a true gent around them, and did his job when required.

The next horse we ‘rescued’ was one that I found while I was out riding Chic. As we rode through a semi-deserted, dilapidated farmyard, Chic became uncharacteristically jumpy and unsettled, as if she knew something I didn’t. An instinct made me decide to have a peek inside a closed cob barn, and a dreadful sight met my eyes: a skinny chestnut mare was lying on a filthy bed, with some mouldy old hay in the corner beside a bucket of stale, greasy water. She had dark filthy patches on her sides from lying in her own droppings and she appeared listless, with her eyes closed, even when I spoke to her.

I had a lump in my throat as I stroked her and whispered words of comfort. It was hard to leave her there, but she obviously belonged to someone and I knew I couldn’t just steal her. Choked with emotion, I went home and told Michael about her, and within the day we’d tracked down the owner and agreed a deal for the horse, which was named Betty. I went back to the barn, slipped a bridle over her head and led her outside into the sunshine. She blinked hard, unaccustomed to the light, but let me lead her on the four-mile walk home, stopping every now and then to munch on some grass by the roadside. We put her in a stable next to Chic with a deep straw bed, and I could tell she was content by the way she settled down and closed her eyes. She knew she was safe.

It was gratifying how quickly horses transformed when they got decent care, turning from depressed, unhealthy animals into lively, happy characters in a short space of time. The more horses we rescued, though, the greater the financial burden on Michael and me. To try to make ends meet, I took a job as a chef at a nearby college, making lunch and tea for the students, and my days became completely dominated with producing food for animals and humans. I got up at five to do the animals first, then made my way to the college by seven. I’d cook until lunchtime then slip home for a few hours to do the housework and chores on the farm. At four I’d feed the horses once more, then return to the college at five to make tea for the students. Then when I got home at seven in the evening, I would tuck up the horses for the night and fall into my own bed not long after. It wasn’t ideal by any means.

Despite this extra income, we couldn’t afford to heat the whole house over the winter so we started living in our bedroom, where there was a sweet little Victorian fireplace in which we could burn coal and logs. We moved the television up there and were quite comfortable, except for the huge shock to the system when we had to use the loo or go to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. As soon as I left the bedroom, the Arctic air chilled me to the bone, and it took ages to get warm again afterwards.

It wasn’t long before we felt that we were perhaps outstaying our welcome on that country estate. Despite our best efforts, the horses had been nibbling at the bark of a few of the trees on the parkland, which wasn’t, understandably, appreciated by the owners. We also worried about the horses being out in the fields when there was farm machinery trundling past and umpteen different people going about their business. We noticed an advertisement in the local paper for the lease of a farm near where we had rescued Betty and when we enquired we found that it was just about affordable, because of the general dilapidation of the property. In the spring of 1995, we packed up lock, stock and barrel and moved to our new home, which went by the name of Greatwood.

Greatwood Farm was set in a steep wooded valley leading down to the River Torridge, and the farmhouse was built back into the hillside. The house was damp and unloved, with peeling wallpaper and an indescribably awful bathroom, but the farmyard was stunning, with plenty of barns, outbuildings and meadows. The tall grassy banks separating the fields were covered in primroses when we arrived, and wildflowers poked out between the cobblestones in the paths. Opposite the farmhouse, a granite track led down to some watermeadows along the riverside and in summer, when the water levels were low enough, there was a ford where we could ride across to the other side. Nothing had been touched for what seemed like hundreds of years, and to us it was idyllic.

The only drawback to Greatwood was that it was on an estate where they ran a commercial pheasant shoot, but the estate owners assured us that they would always give us plenty of advance warning when a shoot was taking place so we could take the horses indoors. We didn’t want to risk them panicking and injuring themselves at the sound of gunshots.

Meanwhile our collection of horses kept growing. We were joined by Fasci, a pony with a dark coat and patchy mane, who we had seen grazing on her own in a field nearby, where she was looked after by an elderly gentleman called Peter. I never like seeing horses on their own, because they are herd animals, so I got into conversation with Peter and after a while I tentatively suggested that maybe Fasci would enjoy the company of coming to board with our lot. He agreed that she could join us, and what’s more, Peter came onboard as well, spending that summer helping us to convert the outbuildings into stables and feed sheds to house our growing menagerie in the coming winter.

We now had enough room for Red, the stallion, to come back and stay with us, and I became determined to find a pal for him to stable with. Horses aren’t usually happy without companionship. It would have to be a small gelding, I decided, with sufficient character to withstand any amorous advances from the lively Red. As luck would have it, I heard about a miniature Shetland pony called Toffee that needed a home. Would Red let a pony share his stable? It wasn’t a conventional pairing and it was with a certain amount of apprehension that we introduced them.

We were pretty confident that Red wouldn’t attack Toffee outright, but nevertheless we stood nervously by with head collars, ready to jump to the rescue if needed. For ten seconds there was silence, then Red let out a roar and tried to scoop Toffee up under his front legs. We were just about to dive in and separate them when Toffee turned, kicked out at Red with both hind legs, then began to explore the surroundings. Instantly Red’s body language changed, and he approached Toffee again with a little more respect and wariness. Toffee ignored his advances, and was clearly quite unfazed by the whole encounter, despite the fact that he was only 28 inches tall, while Red is a thundering Thoroughbred stallion of 16.2 hands (equivalent to 64.8 inches, so more than double Toffee’s height).

We continued to watch for several hours in case the mood turned nasty. Red was fascinated by Toffee now but kept a safe distance from those flying hind feet. As night drew in we decided we should separate them so we could get some sleep without worrying. We put a head collar on Toffee and started to lead him out of the door, and suddenly all hell let loose. Red threw himself around the stable, roaring and screaming, distraught at being separated from his new companion. There was nothing for it. We had to bring Toffee back and I spent a long, uncomfortable night on top of a raised platform at one end of the barn, from where I kept watch on the two of them as they snoozed down below.

The next day, when we turned them out in the field together, Red hurtled round chasing after Toffee but he was met with the same calm indignation as before and he retired sheepishly. They were getting used to each other, though, and it wasn’t long before they were firm friends. In fact, Red often started panicking if Toffee wasn’t in sight for some reason. Within a week they were inseparable.

It was the first instance of my ‘matchmaking’ at Great-wood but by no means the last. Stabling the right horses together made our jobs so much easier that it became one of the most important, and fascinating, of the challenges we faced. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t, and it wasn’t always the obvious matches that worked best.

Betty initially found the move to Greatwood disturbing, because she obviously remembered the bad experiences she’d had in that part of Devon. As we unloaded her from the trailer, she became wide-eyed, started snorting and shook from head to hoof. Thankfully, she had had time to get used to the other horses, and was especially close to Chic, a particularly calm mare, so she took the lead from her.

We’d sold the lambs but we still had our hands full tending the horses, goats, chickens and dogs, so we were more than happy when the local Sunday school started sending children to help us out at weekends. I’ve never been a kiddie-oriented person. I expect them to behave like mini-adults and treat them that way. Despite having five of them, Michael is the same. But the children who came to help at Greatwood were a terrific bunch, who were very helpful to us in mucking out, collecting eggs, sweeping the yard, grooming horses, and all sorts of other tasks. They never misbehaved because there was a certain healthy fear of the huge racehorses clopping around. They paid attention to instructions and were very careful whenever they were in the vicinity of the animals.

I was fascinated by the way the animals responded to children. Even the stroppiest of our horses, such as Jelly and Red, would greet them by lowering their noses so that the child could reach up to give them a stroke. They were careful not to stomp around when a child was in their stable, and stood still when they were being groomed. If only they’d done the same for me, life would have been a lot easier.

Several times Michael and I stood back and marvelled about how calm and gentle they were with children around.

‘Shame they’re only here at the weekends,’ I said, without any idea how prescient the remark would be.