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.
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