That was more than thirty years ago. Aged nineteen, I weighed close to 10 stone and could ride a horse well. I could canter, gallop and jump large fences, and was one step away from making the move into a life surrounded by horses. Jobs with horses were then, and still are, badly paid. Conditions are treacherous and I had very little to fall back on if I didn’t make it. In a rush of blood to the head I abandoned the ambitions for a life with horses and instead took my Olivetti to London. I have been there ever since.
Chapter Three
Six weeks into the new regime, Ralph, who had been best man at Rose’s and my wedding, came to visit with some much needed encouragement. His weight, too, is prone to ballooning since he has an appetite for food, wine and cigars to match my own. However, without telling me, in the past two months he had given up carbohydrates, cut down on wine and managed to lose two stone. He is about to reach forty and I guess he, too, is feeling that mortality is catching up on him.
We had a takeaway curry from Exotika, but no bread or popadoms. I had a green chicken masala curry, Ralph a jalfrezi and we consumed a handful of onion bhajis between us, all washed down with plenty of wine, which I justified by saying that I had not drunk all week. At the end of dinner I took a few puffs on Ralph’s cigar but didn’t like it. During dinner he was positively effusive in his praise of the progress I had made, although I pointed out that I hadn’t gone anywhere near a horse yet. It was encouraging to hear, though, that I was changing shape. Of course, like other friends, Ralph thought the project a little dotty. Years before, I used to ride with Ralph at his mother’s estate in Italy, to where I had exported from England a band of very well-bred Connemara ponies in order to establish a stud. Ralph was useless on a horse, but utterly fearless even though he had great goofy teeth and very bad sight. One day we were hacking in the hot sun through olive groves when a piece of gravel shot up from the rear hoof of the pony I was riding straight into his eye; it got under his contact lens and he screamed and shrieked like a wounded animal. His eye streaming, he begged me to stop, so we did. He abandoned his pony, Cuckoo, right there and then.
The day after our dinner, I was racked with guilt at having strayed from my monastic diet, and determined to redouble my efforts. I cycled twice round the park and made a real effort to puff myself out. I stood up on the pedals, Billy running furiously beside me, trying to keep up as I stretched my legs and felt muscles that I forgot I even had working away under the flab. I did an extra lap of the park as Billy tried to drag me home, and could feel the muscles in my legs aching when I got down off the bike. Even three weeks before I would not have been able to do that. Back home, I gobbled a small portion of linseed and barley for breakfast and a plate of lentils for lunch, cooked in chicken stock until they were firm and crunchy.
As well as upping the mileage around the park, swimming at Chelsea baths was now becoming a daily event. It is an old municipal-style pool with a spectators’ balcony running down one side. The pool is set out in lanes so only those serious about exercising go there, and there are no diving boards or water slides, so there are no children to get in the way. I plunge into the medium lane, the water is lukewarm and I set about my target of twenty lengths.
For the first five lengths I go flat out, stretching my arms and kicking my feet, taking deep breaths to expand my lungs and undo the damage that the smoking has done. Pushing against the water as hard as I can, exhaustion sets in and I slow the pace for the next five lengths, then I try full exertion for two lengths before slowing down again. I know if I were doing the exercise on dry land I’d be soaked in sweat, and with a lean lunch in my belly it is not long before I can feel the fat burning off me. The water keeps my temperature down and I can feel my heart pumping through the ripples. Back on the bike for the cycle home, my legs ache and I struggle to ride in a straight line. The discipline is marvellous, and six weeks in a proper routine has developed, all of which makes me wonder why I hadn’t started doing this twenty years earlier.
While Rose has helped me put the diet together she still brings home mouth-watering food to feed the children. To start with I was able to sit at the table with them as they ate, strong-willed enough not to be tempted to pick at their leftovers, or to find an excuse for just one small mouthful of succulent beef. By the end of February I had lost around seven pounds (or fourteen packets of butter, as I preferred to view it) and could feel that my clothes had loosened around my girth. But I knew myself too well, and could feel the temptation threatening to get the better of me. So I found ways to distract myself while the children were having dinner. I would find an excuse to be on the phone, take the dog for a walk – anything that would keep me out of the way of Mr Robinson’s sausages. In the past, as plates of delicious food were put down in front of the children I might occasionally take a mouthful of sausage from their plates, or a slice of tender chicken. Not now, though. When they ask me to come and sit with them I might finish their greens, which I know are good for me and they can’t stand.
I weigh myself every day, and eventually the needle starts to creep back anticlockwise from 15 stone 10, where it had been stubbornly fixed in the first few weeks. As I stand, I practise pushing my knees together as I have been taught to do in preparation for riding. The trousers aren’t pinching as much as they did even a week ago and I already feel much better, with all the exercise and the fresh air that is now filling my lungs. The time has come to sit on a horse and start riding for the first time in twenty years.
I last got on a horse when I was twenty-eight, on a trip to Ireland. Next to me on the plane was my most recent (and very tricky) girlfriend and ahead of us was a new adventure and with it the hope that this would be the beginning of something special. I had been sent, in the middle of a bitter winter, by the Evening Standard to write a piece about property in Ireland, a country that was in the depths of recession and twenty years into the Troubles that began in 1969. I had little interest in the piece but knew that it was an opportunity to indulge my passion for horses, and my fixation with the girl sitting beside me.
At Dublin airport we hired a car and drove to Mullingar, Co. Westmeath. I had a week to write the piece, and I decided it could wait. I had been offered a day’s foxhunting by a former Master of the Westmeath Foxhounds, and I could not possibly refuse. Hunting in Ireland was something I had never done before, but had always wanted to. My girlfriend, a lissom blonde, was at heart a girl from the shires, horsy to the tips of her upper-class toes. How she would admire me, I imagined, as I took those vast Irish walls at full gallop in pursuit of a fox. How brave. How handsome … I could not wait to show off.
Hunting in Ireland was something that all horse types aspired to. Its stone walls, open ditches and the fast galloping pace was a very different affair to the more sedate hunting fields of England, and offered everything that I loved about being on a horse. The day before the hunt, with my tutor, a grand horseman called Frankie Kiernan, we rode out to get acquainted with the countryside and to shake off the staleness of the working week.
My horse, a beast of an iron-grey gelding named Zachariah, was, at just four years old, much younger than the horses I had been used to, but his behaviour belied his youthfulness. A Thoroughbred crossed with an Irish draught (a carthorse to you and me) standing around sixteen hands high, he was perfectly bred for the job. His predominant gene being Irish draught meant that he was calm and unflustered but at the same time he moved forward nicely and seemed unperturbed by the jumping experience, traits unusual in a horse so young. He had also just been sold to my friend’s brother-in-law in England and he was due to be shipped over to Wiltshire within a matter of days. While he was inexperienced, a few words from Frankie reassured me. ‘If you try and hold that fella up like you’re doing you’ll get into terrible trouble.’ But I had an audience to impress and I thought I knew everything there was to know about horses, so I was trying to get the horse to bounce in front of the open ditches we were practising over, and then leap like a stag over them. Frankie pulled me up immediately. ‘The only way to ride open ditches is at a fast gallop,’ he said. ‘Just lean over him and let him go’. I tried it Frankie’s way and it worked a treat. Zachariah galloped and galloped and we flew round fields, over low stone walls and wide drainage ditches. London, the Standard, the job I was meant to be here doing seemed a million miles away. It was everything I hoped an Irish hunting adventure would be. My girlfriend