Amongst those five was Horrible Horace, a deformed goose my brother had dumped on us. Horace may have been crooked and bent, but his disability didn’t stop him flying at any children who came nearby. He thought he was a dog and would rush up to greet visitors, honk whenever the dogs barked and accompany us on walks. All our attempts to pass Horace on to other people failed, so we were stuck with yet another difficult, eccentric, bloody-minded animal to care for.
As if our financial troubles weren’t enough, word began to spread that we were prepared to step in and help with sick, temperamental or abandoned ex-racehorses. It seemed there were lots of people out there desperately trying to find a home for horses that were too old, past their prime or that hadn’t ever fulfilled their potential. Thoroughbreds need experienced handlers because many of them are unused to being ridden by anyone but a professional jockey and, what’s more, they are expensive to keep. Many of them need to be reschooled if they are ever to have a second career, but this took time, money and expertise.
Michael and I couldn’t possibly accommodate every single horse that was offered to us, but we spent hours on the telephone giving advice and trying to find potential owners for each animal, because the alternative was too awful to contemplate. For such beautiful, intelligent animals to be discarded simply because they couldn’t run fast enough was not morally acceptable.
As a farmer’s daughter I know there are hard realities to be faced in livestock breeding. My blunt Yorkshire father once said, ‘The very word “livestock” implies “deadstock” and if you can’t handle it, you’d better do something else with your life.’ But my heart always melted when a seriously ill or badly treated horse was brought to us. I could never turn them away.
In the first year at Greatwood, there was a mare called Kay whose owner hadn’t been able to afford proper medical care for her. Kay was in a lot of pain when she came to us and kept trying to kick up at her stomach. The owner said she’d tried to train her out of kicking herself but to no avail. But why was she doing it? What was the problem? I called the vet, who detected a sizeable growth in her stomach, and told me that sadly it was inoperable. There was nothing he could do. It was a horrible night, with rain lashing down and gale-force winds ripping around the barn. We had no alternative but to have Kay put down, with the other horses standing round watching. There was a collective whinny as she fell to the floor and a few came over to sniff her but most carried on eating their hay. They didn’t know her, so weren’t directly affected. As we left the barn, I felt unutterably sad for that poor horse, who’d obviously been suffering for some time. Vets’ bills are expensive. That’s why we had to be sure that when we rehomed horses, we only did so with people who could afford to keep them properly. We couldn’t risk any horses that passed through our hands ending up like Kay, or Betty, or Charlie.
Our own financial situation went from bad to worse. Each new bill was greeted with much head-scratching and the scribbling of frantic sums on the backs of envelopes, and every month rent day loomed like a sick headache. How had we got ourselves into such a pickle? The inheritance from Michael’s aunt and the money from the sale of our house had long gone, and we had very few, tiny sources of income. Then one day, I got a phone call that gave us a glimmer of hope.
‘My name’s Vivien McIrvine,’ the voice said. ‘I’m Vice President of the International League for the Protection of Horses. I’ve been hearing a lot about you and everything you are trying to do for racehorses and I wanted to tell you that I’m full of admiration for the work you’re doing.’
‘Thank you. That’s good to hear. But I’m afraid it’s just a drop in the ocean.’
We chatted for a while about the horses we had at that time, the ones looking for new homes and the ones we’d managed to rehome already, then she got to the purpose of her call.
‘The work you are doing with racehorse welfare is invaluable and rare. You must carry on and, as I see it, the only way that you can do that is if you put it on a firm footing and become a registered charity.’
Michael and I had already been considering this option but the call from an icon of horse welfare pushed us into thinking about it more seriously. It was a great compliment to hear of her admiration for our work and for a few days afterwards we mulled it all over. We knew there was a chance our application wouldn’t be successful anyway, but if it were, we’d become accountable to the charity commissioners and would have to be much more professional about the way we managed what had been, until then, an instinctive kind of operation. But we really had no choice. We had already become heavily involved in not-for-profit work on behalf of ex-racehorses by funding it all ourselves, but we couldn’t go on like that because our funds were rapidly evaporating and we would have become insolvent. That would have brought an end to our work and most certainly an end to the lives of the horses in our care.
Decision made, we started the lengthy process of applying to be a charity, which initially involved filling out an extraordinary number of forms. We were warned that the granting of charitable status could take a while – always assuming our application was approved – but it felt like a step in the right direction.
We had decided some months before this to stop breeding horses. We had only bred a dozen or so before we realised there were too many being bred that didn’t ever reach the race course, either because they weren’t fast enough or for some other reason. There was no organisation in place to care for these unwanted horses and, at that time, no one was encouraging ordinary horse owners to take on a Thoroughbred. By breeding horses, we were contributing to the problem and as soon as we became aware of this, we stopped.
In the meantime, we had four mares that were all due to foal around the same time, and umpteen ewes that were due to lamb, which meant a couple of months at least when Michael and I would have to survive on very little sleep. Fortunately we have entirely different sleep patterns. I rise early and go to bed early, while he’s the opposite, so we agreed that he would sit up with them until 2am then I’d take over from 2 until morning.
Sometimes foaling was reasonably straightforward, but when it came to Chic we were in for a marathon. She was in labour for hours, the foal wasn’t in the correct position and we had to call the vet to come and turn it. Out it came, tiny and weak, but Chic was still in labour and we realised she had a twin in there, which was eventually born dead, about the size of a cat. The first foal was very weak and didn’t have a sucking reflex so we had to tube-feed him. He was shivering with cold, so I got one of my jumpers and threaded his tiny front legs through the sleeves, then I wrapped tinfoil round his back legs to try to retain the heat. He was a poor little creature. Chic licked him gently, every ounce the loving mother.
For three days we nursed that foal day and night, and on the third day we were heartened when he managed to get to his feet and stagger a few steps on what were impossibly long legs for such a tiny chap. Chic stayed very close, watching what we were doing and letting us milk her, but she didn’t try to intervene. She knew we were doing our best. Then on the fourth day, the foal’s breathing became laboured. I sat down beside him, put his head on my lap and whispered to him gently as he passed away in my arms. There was a huge lump in my throat. He’d struggled valiantly but was just too weak to live.
I felt so sorry for Chic. She’d been good and patient, and we’d all tried our hardest, but it wasn’t to be. She kept nudging the foal’s body, trying to get it to move, so we left her with it for a few hours so she could understand he had gone.
It would have been a crying shame if no good had come out of the experience so we asked around and found out about a local foal that had lost its mother, and we took Chic over to see if she would adopt it. We used that classic country trick of skinning Chic’s dead foal and placing the skin over the