This is the story of an outsider, an unlikely horse and the incredible bond that took them to Olympic gold.
Charlotte Dujardin has been riding since the age of two and competing since the age of three. Despite leaving school at sixteen and sacrificing everything to follow her dream, breaking into the elite world of dressage wasn’t easy. Following a chance encounter, Dujardin was invited to be a groom for the British Olympian Carl Hester where she began to ride Valegro; a dark bay Dutch Warmblood, with a large canter, an explosive energy and a tendency to shake his head with nerves.
Dujardin was asked to train Valegro with the intention that Hester would eventually take over the ride. But the young groom and horse had an almost telepathic connection and Charlotte was soon putting Valegro through unbelievably challening routines. His hot energy and her athletic determination became a firebrand partnership, and one which Hester did not want to break.
Fast forward to Greenwich 2012, the Olympic Games. Charlotte Dujardin enters the equestrian ring riding Valegro for the individual dressage event. Working through a series of intricate movements, they have the audience spellbound. Just over six minutes later and the pair had delivered a routine with a score of 90.089%. It was an Olympic record and only the third score in history over 90 per cent.
The world was captivated by this girl and her dancing horse. This is their extraordinary story.
Charlotte Dujardin, CBE is the winner of three Olympic gold medals and one silver medal, and is Great Britain’s most successful Olympic equestrian.
To Valegro, for being my horse of a lifetime and for making all of my dreams come true.
To every single person who has contributed and supported my journey, I truly thank you from the bottom of my heart. To everyone mentioned in this book and to those who have contributed along the way, please know that your support and endeavours have meant so much to me. To Trevor Dolby, Ajda Vučićević, Becky Millar, Laura Brooke and all at Cornerstone, Penguin Random House, Stephanie Cross, Mervyn Lyn and my manager Abby Newell, who made it possible for me to tell this story in my own words.
All other photographs are author’s own.
Every reasonable effort has been made to contact all copyright holders, but if there are any errors or omissions, we will insert the appropriate acknowledgement in subsequent printings of this book.
PEOPLE OFTEN ASK me if dressage horses dance by themselves. ‘Are you just sitting there steering?’ they say. ‘Because I’ve watched you and I can’t see how you’re doing it.’
It’s a question I love, because if it doesn’t look like I’m doing anything then I’m doing something right. Dressage is all about harmony: having a relationship with your horse where it has confidence in you so that everything you do together looks effortless and easy, like it’s all happening by magic. But I can tell you now, there wasn’t a whole lot of harmony at the beginning.
The first time I remember sitting on a horse I must have been three or four years old. She was called Sovereign and she was dark beige with white socks and a little white blaze down her face. We were in the field at the back of our house in Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire and my mum was trying to teach me, but this naughty little pony just would not stop putting her head down to eat grass.
Horses were my mum Jane’s passion. She’d evented and had a good career as a show jumper before she got pregnant with my sister Emma-Jayne, who was born in 1982. Then I came along in 1985, followed by my brother Charles in 1986. Mum carried on competing for a bit after we were born, but we ended up being too much of a distraction: we’d cry for her when she was in the ring, and when she was driving to shows we’d need her to stop the horsebox all the time so we could go for a wee.
Mum still had a few horses while we were little and when she was mucking them out in the mornings we’d be desperately trying to get on their backs. Mum would throw us up on top to shut us up and we’d sit there, clinging onto their rugs, clicking our tongues and trying to gee them up while she carried on working. I never wanted to get down when she’d finished – she literally had to peel me off.
Mum must have been ready to tear her hair out, watching me trying to ride Sovereign. ‘Give her a kick! Give her a kick!’ she kept yelling, but I was so tiny my legs didn’t even reach her sides and were just banging up and down on the saddle. I sat there flapping away and eventually Mum lost it completely and came over and shooed us into a trot. Off we’d go for a couple of strides, then the next minute Sovereign’s head was back down and she’d start eating again. No matter what I did, I just could not get her to move.
Looking back, it wasn’t the greatest start to my career, but even then horses were how I wanted to spend every minute of every day. At school I’d sit at my desk hating every second and trying to work out how many years of it I’d got left: it wasn’t going to help me ride better, so for me there wasn’t any point in being there. My elder sister was the naughty one who played truant, but I was always too scared of getting into trouble in case Mum banned me from riding. I couldn’t pretend I was too ill for school, either: ‘Oh, no, if you can ride your ponies, you’re perfectly fine. Get your uniform on and hurry up.’
How different would it have been if my maternal grandmother had got her way and Mum had been a dancer? My nan was originally a dressmaker and her marriage to my granddad was the second time for both of them. Mum’s stepsister was a professional dancer with a job on The Sooty Show, but Mum (as she’ll say herself) was not cut out to be on the stage, even though she was sent to stage school.
Her dad had his own business making light fittings and was very successful in his younger years. His own father had bought a house in Sintra, Portugal in the 1950s, and during the summer my great-grandfather came back to England to look after the family business while my nan and granddad took my mum, her brother and step-siblings to Portugal on holiday.
My granddad was very generous with his money, and much more supportive of my mum’s equestrian interests than my nan was. One year when they were on holiday he finally caved in and bought my mum a horse, and then when they got home he bought her another so she had one to ride in England as well. What nobody knew was that the Portuguese horse was in foal, so it wasn’t long before there were three. Eventually, my granddad decided the amount of money he was spending on livery was ridiculous and he might as well just buy a house with stables. My nan found a derelict farm near Broxbourne in Hertfordshire and they ended up converting it into one of the best yards in the area, to the point where a very important visitor came to stay: Red Rum.
Apparently, Mum was out hacking one afternoon when she was stopped by a passing car. The driver was an assistant to ‘Ginger’ McCain, who had famously trained Red Rum to three Grand National victories in the 1970s. It turned out that Red Rum, by then retired from racing, was opening the Hoddesdon and Broxbourne Carnival that year and needed somewhere to stay locally. Mum didn’t hesitate to recommend her home, White Stubbs Farm, so along came Red Rum for a couple of nights – the first superstar horse in the family.
My mum had known my dad, Ian, most of her life. The Dujardins had played a big part in the medieval cotton industry in France, but Dad was born in Enfield, Greater London, not far from where my mum’s parents were living. They were childhood sweethearts growing up, and when my grandparents sold their house to move to White Stubbs Farm, it was Ian’s parents who bought it. Dad had his own packaging company when he married Mum in 1981, and for a while they lived in Cheshunt, Hertfordshire, but when I was about nine months old we moved to The Round House, which had eight stables and a proper outdoor school.
It was after we’d moved there that Mum decided to get into show ponies. She wasn’t the type of person who could just have horses as a hobby, and she knew that in the showing world kids could compete from the age of two.
One of the first shows I can remember was a lead-rein class on my little chestnut, Toy Grenadier, when I was four. Because my sister was older she’d already done all her lead reins, which drove me crazy, and Mum and I would argue about it all the time.
‘I don’t want to be on the lead! I want to do what Emma-Jayne’s doing!’
‘You have to be on the lead, Charlotte, that’s why it’s a lead-rein class.’
I couldn’t wait until the moment at the end when she’d let me off so I could go for a ride round the car park on my own.
Being too small to tack up my own pony was another thing that really used to annoy me: even when I was strong enough to pick up the saddle, I couldn’t always find something to stand on so I could reach. I was very proud when I finally managed to do it, because until then I’d always had to watch Mum, and being able to do what she was doing made me feel like such a grown up.
We weren’t allowed to muck around on the show ponies at home, but when I was three or four Mum and Dad bought us a couple of little black hairy Shetlands called Sally and Jo-Jo. Sally came all wrapped up with a massive red ribbon round her tummy, and my sister and I would fight over who got stuck riding her because Jo-Jo was really good, whereas Sally would stop, buck and then fling you clean off. We’d have races across the field and down to the river to see who could go the fastest, and one of us would always end up on the ground either because we’d been bucked off or gone flying over our pony’s head when it stopped to eat grass.
One day, we decided that we wanted to drive Sally like a carthorse. We’d seen my mum driving horses at White Stubbs Farm and although we didn’t have a cart we did have a silver garden wheelbarrow. We put a milk crate in it to sit on, then tied Sally to the handles with some rope round her belly and got her to tow us round the place. It was absolutely brilliant, but you can imagine what your mum’s going to say when she comes out of the house and sees you doing that.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?!’
All three of us were naughty kids. When my brother was slightly older my parents bought him a quad bike and my dad put some kind of speed-limiting device on the throttle for safety. As soon as Dad wasn’t around we worked out how to get it off, then we’d all take turns at going flat-out round the field and fit the control back on when we’d finished so he’d never know.
When we went to shows Charles would sometimes bring his quad along in the back of the lorry. He was less into ponies and more into boy stuff like tractors and motorbikes and fishing, although he was actually quite a good rider when my sister and I managed to get him to do it. The only problem was if his pony cantered and went too fast, because then he’d jump off. He called himself Superman because he’d fly through the air and do a tumble in the sand – if he was going to have to make an exit, bless him, he at least wanted it to be a planned one.
One thing my brother did like getting involved in was making jumps. Although we had a school we had nothing to jump over, so we’d make fences out of anything we could find: milk crates, canisters, logs, bales of straw – you name it, we’d jump it. We’d build it all up as high as we could and when we weren’t jumping the horses, we were jumping the dogs – Blitz, who was a pointer; Rugby; Chalkie, who was a Westie; and Jack and Russell, who were self-explanatory. It was all good fun setting everything up but not so much fun putting it away, and of course that was when Charles could never be found.
Another of my brother’s loves was his Carolina corn snake, which I was interested in, too: I thought it was quite an educational experience watching the way it could shed its skin in one piece. I even liked feeding it insects, which is just disgusting to think about now, so I’m not surprised that one friend of ours, Wendy Hiard, wouldn’t even set foot in our house until she knew the snake was locked in its cage. Obviously, the evening it went missing was an evening when she was round.
We hunted for it absolutely everywhere we could think of: in the cupboards, under the sofa, in the cutlery drawers. Then someone looked up and there it was, twined all round the curtain rail. Poor Wendy screamed the place down. It was great entertainment for the night.
Most weeks, we’d go and visit my nan at White Stubbs Farm, which I always used to enjoy. She’d give us pocket money and take us to the Jolly Waggoner pub for scampi and chips in a basket and generally do all the kinds of things nans do. Visits were harder for my mum because Nan could be quite difficult and after she and Granddad got divorced in the early eighties she also drank quite a lot. When we went to visit her Mum was always trying to tidy and clean the house up a bit, and it must have had an impact on us kids because none of us drink much now. At the time we didn’t think about it, though: there was a bar in the house and we’d often pretend to be grown-ups and pour each other Cokes, but we usually spent more time in the yard seeing the liveries than in the house with our nan.
Some of the best times we had together as a family were weekends out hacking with the Dockleys. Paul Dockley was a police officer, and a former boyfriend of Mum’s. They had a son who was Emma-Jayne’s age and a daughter a bit younger than Charles, and so we gave Jo-Jo the Shetland to them when we grew out of her.
We’d box the ponies up to a village somewhere, and Paul and Wendy would lead their children while my sister and I would ride a couple of our show ponies. My mum and dad would walk and Charles would be on his pushbike. We’d go for miles like this until we came to a pub. Then we’d stop, tie the ponies up and have sandwiches, crisps and Coke out of the bottle – I loved that bit – hack back and drive home again.
One day when we were out we had to cross a ford. The water that the cars drove through was quite shallow, but on either side it was deeper. Right, I thought, I’m taking Dylan in there.
Dylan was a steel grey Welsh Section A with a mane down to his shoulders. He looked like a rocking horse, but he was a real pain to keep clean: before shows we’d have to put his tail in a bag to stop him messing down it and every time you took him out for a hack he’d come back filthy. Anyway, I got him in the water and he started pawing and digging away. I was laughing because water was splashing everywhere, everyone else was laughing while they watched us, but then the next moment Dylan was getting down to roll with me. Dad came sprinting in to rescue us but because the bottom of the ford was covered in slime, he slipped and went straight on his bum. He got soaked to the skin, I got soaked to the skin, and everybody else ended up absolutely wetting themselves laughing.
For all of us, showing was like one big adventure. During the season we’d be chasing qualifiers for Horse of the Year Show and the Royal International Horse Show up and down the country: Lincolnshire, Cheshire, Devon, Cornwall … Sometimes, if the show was too far to drive in a day, Mum would bath us kids the evening before, get us in our pyjamas, then put us up in the Luton of our lorry to sleep while Dad drove. We’d wake up the next day at the show and Dad would give us our breakfast and get us dressed in our showing gear while Mum went and got the ponies ready.
Dad liked horses but he didn’t love them like Mum did, so while we were competing he’d usually stay in the lorry, chilling out with the motor racing on TV and his special smoked salmon sandwiches. Every now and then he’d nip out to check how we were getting on, then pop back in to catch the end of a race.
My mum always had a bottle of champagne if we did well – for some reason we’d keep the cork and stick a fifty-pence piece in it – and my sister and I would have an ice cream or sweets from one of the vans at the showground. Then we’d get in the lorry and I’d last about five minutes before nodding off, sleep all the way back, and wake up five minutes before we got home to help Mum offload.
I always wanted to win, always. I was a terrible loser and if I made mistakes Mum would be frustrated, I would be frustrated, and then I’d get annoyed and moan like mad. In our kitchen at home we had a big board covered in net with all the rosettes we’d won hooked into it. These were mainly red as we made sure we hid the blue and yellow second- and third-place ones at the bottom because nobody liked looking at those. Emma-Jayne and I didn’t compete much against each other because she was older and doing different classes, but we still argued all the time about who’d won what and eventually we had to start writing our names and the date on the back of every single rosette so we had proof.
Because we were on the road so much during the summer, holidays weren’t top priority for us. To begin with, we’d go and see my grandfather in Portugal, which was where he moved after divorcing my nan. I hated just lying in the sun, but shopping in the local fruit and veg markets was brilliant – it’s something I still love doing now whenever I’m somewhere new – and Mum would also take us for horse and carriage rides as a distraction from being away from the ponies. But as showing began to take up more of our time and money, we were usually too busy to go away and sometimes we ended up missing days at school as well.
It was quite interesting to see how different teachers reacted: Mum would write notes and explain that we were riding at county-level shows, not just mucking around, and some teachers were really nice about it, especially if we won or did well. Some of them didn’t give a damn, and a few of them would be cross and make a point of being harder on us.
In my first years at school I found I was quite dyslexic – even the word ‘test’ made me feel sick to my stomach – and Tuesday spelling lessons with Mrs Watkins at Woodford Primary frightened me to death. (That was another thing I loved about my ponies: as soon as I was on a horse, it was like being granted my freedom. I would start riding and all my worries would just melt away.) Eventually I began to get some extra one-to-one help, and my dad was also great at helping me with my maths because he was so good with figures. Art homework was the one thing I did enjoy because I was such a perfectionist, and I would stay up for hours at night drawing and finishing off, but generally Friday could never come quickly enough throughout my entire time at school.
Spelling tests were one thing; showing was another. I never got nervous before competitions: the bigger the crowd, the more I liked it. Getting to the Royal International Horse Show at Hickstead in July was one of my dreams as a kid. In the morning, classes would be held in the smaller arenas, but if you got through to the championships you’d be in the big main arena with the showjumpers’ huge grass Derby bank and everybody watching.
The Horse of the Year Show at Wembley in October was another competition I loved, partly because of the milk float that came round in the morning selling essentials to the people who’d stayed in their lorries overnight. Emma-Jayne and I would worry Dad for money until he gave in and then go and get ourselves milkshakes for breakfast: banana for me and chocolate for Emma-Jayne. Then in the evenings the grown-ups would stay in the lorries and all the kids who’d been competing would go and watch the showjumping in the main arena. We’d have popcorn and ice cream and get told off for talking and being noisy, but as soon as the Whitaker brothers came in everybody would be screaming and shouting the place down, especially if John was on Milton. They were the superstars of my era and had won individual and team golds in the 1989 Europeans, as well as the World Cup Final in 1990 and 1991. One year I can remember seeing Milton in his stable backstage and plucking a few hairs out of his tail because I wanted a souvenir – which I probably shouldn’t be admitting.
By the time I was riding at Wembley, I’d gone from lead-rein to first ridden classes with a pony called Cwmtowel Diana. We were quite a successful combination. There was one occasion at a show in Cheshire when we were presented with a trophy by a lady in a green dress, who turned out to be the Queen of Spain.
Diana was really cool but incredibly sharp. My mum had to lunge her for hours before I could get on her, to try and make her as tired as possible, and even then she’d still get quite goey if we were at a show with a lot of atmosphere. I always liked hot horses so it didn’t bother me, and Diana was also a really pretty little pony: I used to love competing her because it meant I could wear a pink rose pinned to my jacket to go with her pink diamanté brow band.
Showing was all about that kind of attention to detail, and attention to detail was something Mum was amazing at. She was quite house-proud – we were never allowed posters on our walls, and when she was cleaning at the weekends, she’d kick us all out for the day so we didn’t get in her hair. With the ponies, Mum knew all the tricks: dying their tails with Nice’n Easy; chalking their legs to make their socks white; wiping baby oil round their eyes to make them look bigger. If your pony had a black nose you could put a bit of shoe-polish on that as well, but then they’d wipe themselves on you when you tried to lead them in hand and you’d end up with black all down your nice clean shirt sleeves.
The problem was that because image was everything in showing, actually being able to ride didn’t matter as much. You’d regularly see kids who didn’t know which leg their pony was cantering on, or who didn’t know how to turn properly or use the corners of the arena. Often, they’d been plonked on at the last minute: their grooms or their mothers or professional show-pony producers had been the ones riding and training their ponies day in, day out, so when they did find themselves in the ring on what was more-or-less a strange horse, they’d panic and try and get it over with as fast as possible.
At home, Emma-Jayne and I were not only riding under Mum’s watchful eye every day, we were also being taught by a friend of hers called Debi Thomas.
Debi had got to know my mum at White Stubbs Farm in the late seventies when Debi was working as an equine nurse. At the time, she was passionate about eventing, but after she got married and had children she decided to switch to dressage and was now aiming to compete at the top level, Grand Prix.
Like my mum, Debi had a fantastic eye for detail, and when she came to teach me and Emma-Jayne she’d make sure we knew how to sit up nice and tall in the saddle and not grip with our legs. She made me think constantly about what I was doing and she always worked me hard, but it paid off.
The showing world was full of cliques and sometimes you’d know who was going to win before you’d even got into the arena. Competitions were judged in two parts and although the first part was all about the pony’s conformation, the marks for the second part were awarded for a little individual ridden show. That meant that if a judge wanted a particular horse to win because they knew the owners or the producers, it was quite easy for them to fiddle the results.
That side of it was something I really hated, and the more unfair I thought it was, the more determined I was to win – even then I loved a challenge. One year, I qualified our fourteen-hand hunter pony, Groveside Dexterity (Twiggy), for the Horse of the Year Show at Hickstead. For weeks before I’d been practising my riding with Debi: as part of the show, the judge could sometimes ask you to gallop, and if the grass of the arena was uneven keeping your pony balanced could be hard. But when the judge lined us all up Twiggy and I were way down in thirteenth or fourteenth place out of a class of twenty. It was a boiling hot day and I was wearing my shirt, a waistcoat, a thick tweed jacket and a tie, none of which you were allowed to take off. I had to sit there watching all the other riders do their individual shows, but finally it was my turn and when I’d finished the judge pulled us up to first. Knowing we’d beaten all the professional producers with a horse we’d trained ourselves at home was brilliant, just the best feeling: Mum and I were ecstatic.
As we began to become known as a competing family, people started to send us their ponies to sort out. My parents could only ever afford to buy us difficult ponies anyway so I didn’t mind, but there were times when you’d end up on the floor so much you felt like a stunt rider in a rodeo. Mum would pick me up whenever I came off, dust me down, stick me on and send me back for the next round.
That was one of the main differences between my sister and me: you’d have to persuade Emma-Jayne to get back on, whereas I never accepted defeat. It was the same if I had a problem with my riding. I’d be out in the school until I’d fixed it, but if it didn’t happen soon for Emma-Jayne, she’d get off, cry and throw her horse in the field. Then I’d get it in from the field, tack it up and sort it out. Obviously, she hated me for it, especially if one of her ponies went better for me than it did for her. We joke about it now but we could be pretty horrible to each other, and my revenge would always be to go off, do something Emma-Jayne couldn’t and make sure Mum was watching. ‘Mum! Mum! Come and see what I can do!’
One year, my poor sister was unloading her pony, Indie, from the lorry and it stood on her foot and ripped off her toenail. She couldn’t ride, and when I took over I ended up qualifying it for Hickstead. That didn’t go down very well, nor did the time my mum put me on Buzz, a thirteen-hand dapple-grey hunter pony that was meant to be Emma-Jayne’s. For some reason he hated her: it was hard to say what it was about, but they clashed in their ways and generally did not get on. Mum had decided we were going to do some jumping at home one evening and I was fine on my pony, but when Buzz got to the fence he stopped and my sister fell off. She got back on and we went round again, and I jumped the fence and Buzz stopped again and Emma-Jayne went over his head. That was when she got really angry. ‘That’s it. I’ve had enough. I’m going in.’ Mum wasn’t having any of it. ‘Right, Charlotte, you get on.’ So I got on Buzz and off we went and jumped the fence.
I felt bad for my sister, especially because Mum used to say that I was the more talented rider. It seems like quite a harsh thing to say, although I think Emma-Jayne realised it was true. I had a natural feel, a sense of what I needed to do when I got on a horse. I think now it must be similar to the way artists work: they have an idea in their mind of what they want to draw, then they get a piece of paper and do it. It’s weird, but riding is like that for me. I have a sense in my head of what I want to do, then I get on the horse and somehow I can translate it into the things I do with my legs and seat. My mum always said, ‘Charlotte’s brains are in her arse.’ I like to think it was my natural riding ability she was referring to.
In the early nineties, my dad’s business was doing quite well and that was when my parents decided to buy Ardenhall Royal Secret (Millie) for us. Mum had seen Millie in Horse & Hound and, although she wasn’t for sale, managed to talk her owners into parting with her. Until that point we’d never had expensive ponies, but Millie cost £30,000. She was 12.2 hands and every little girl’s dream of a pony: dark liver chestnut with a gloss always on her coat, a white blaze and huge, melting dark eyes. At the time she was being kept in Carmarthenshire at the yard of a producer called Debbie Thomas (another one). The politics of the showing world were such that Mum didn’t want to move her, so that meant I had to start going off to Wales at weekends and holidays.
Debbie Thomas’s yard wasn’t very posh: the stables were converted chicken sheds and the Thomases lived in a mobile home. It was a bit like being away at camp because we slept on mattresses on the floor, but Debbie and her sister Cathy always made you feel looked after. They were both very petite, which meant they could ride kids’ ponies themselves, and I never once saw Debbie without a cigarette in her mouth. She’d even smoke when she was riding. The picture I have of her in my head is of someone permanently wearing a riding hat, a pair of chaps and breeches – I don’t actually know if she owned any other clothes because while I was there we were all on horses, morning, noon and night.
This was my first real experience of being away from home without my family and during the day it was fine as there were always other kids and their ponies to bundle in with. Night-times were terrible, though. I’d call Mum, crying and begging for her to come and get me. The relief when she came up to see me I can’t even begin to describe – to this day, I don’t think there’s anything that can beat the comfort of a Mum-hug. There were times when I absolutely dreaded having to go, but I would never have refused because I was doing what I genuinely loved.
Kids with tears rolling down their faces was a sight you’d often see at shows, usually because their mothers were screaming at them and/or their ponies were being horrible. Mum was our driver, our groom and our mentor, and she made sure we were one hundred per cent dedicated: we had to be up before school to muck out our ponies, and when we were home we were straight out to do them. But she was never a pushy parent. As far as I was concerned, being in the ring, or in the lorry on the way to a competition with my family round me, was as good as it got.
The best thing about being at Debbie’s was that as well as riding Millie, I got to ride all the other ponies that Debbie was producing. The breadth of knowledge and experience it gave me was fantastic, and without it I probably wouldn’t be the rider I am today. What I learned is that a horse is like a puzzle with different strengths and weaknesses, and it’s your job to put the pieces together and work out how to get the best out of them. Solving that jigsaw is something I still love doing now, and I can honestly say that I find it at least as satisfying as competing.
At Debbie’s I was always put on the most awkward ponies in the yard, but the more difficult a pony was, the more I wanted to get on it anyway. There were too many to remember, but Cotspring Song I’ll never forget. He was a fourteen-hand hunter pony and when you sat on him he’d rear straight up: the poor girl who was meant to be competing him was petrified.
Horses are clever animals – really clever. If you get on them and you’re nervous and tight yourself, they pick up on it straight away. Often I’ll see horses being naughty and it’s because their rider is scared of them, or not being clear in what they’re asking, which is making their horse panicked and stressed. Punishing them is not the answer, and with Cot I knew that the key was staying as calm as possible whenever I rode him.
Gradually we began to develop a bit of a partnership, although my mum never liked watching me on him.
‘Charlotte, are you really sure you should be riding that one?’
‘Oh, yes, Mum, I’m fine. Really!’
I even qualified him for Hickstead, although I never won on him, which was good as he was the kind of horse who would refuse to go away from other horses: he’d have started doing handstands if you’d asked him to walk out of line to get his prize. Riding Cot, I can say hand on heart, was the only time in my entire career when I’ve been grateful to come second.
Meanwhile, Millie was justifying my parents’ investment and she and my sister were soon going from strength to strength: in 1994 they won eighteen out of eighteen county shows, the Royal International and the Horse of the Year Show. But then things took a horrible turn for the worse.
IN OUR FAMILY, Mum stayed at home looking after us kids and Dad was the breadwinner and dealt with the bills. He loved providing for us and giving us things: Molly, my Jack Russell, should have been a goldfish, but Dad was with me when we went to the pet shop and I saw her in her cage. Mum wasn’t very pleased with him when we all got home.
‘What the hell have you bought now, Ian!’
Dad was always getting into trouble, especially at Christmas. Mum was a real tree artist – still is to this day – but quite careful when it came to money, whereas Dad loved pushing the boat out. For all of us, Christmas was a really special family time. Emma-Jayne and I shared a bedroom but at Christmas my brother would come in with us so we could get up early and muck out the ponies together because none of us was allowed our presents until they’d been done. We’d rush to do them as fast as we could, then we’d go back in and Mum and Dad would make us sing carols outside their bedroom door before we were allowed down to the lounge to see what Santa had left. My parents would put some port and a mince pie out for him, and my dad would spray fake snow round his old wellies so there’d be footprints – honestly, it was ridiculous how convinced I used to be. Food was another big feature of our Christmases, and Dad loved getting the shopping in. ‘I’m just going down the road for five minutes,’ he’d say, and be gone for two hours.
Probably because he took pride in that role, Dad tried to keep the problems his business was in to himself. That meant the first my mum knew of it was when she got a letter telling her that our house was going to be repossessed.
I was about eight at the time, so too young to understand properly what was going on. What I did know was that we might lose everything, and I saw how upset that made my mum and sister. Mum was crying all the time, and if she saw a van turn in at the top of our lane that she thought might be the bailiffs, she would hide under the table and get my sister to answer the door. What scared me most about it all was that I didn’t realise it was just our things they wanted: I thought they’d come to take Mum away.
My parents had different ways of dealing with what was happening to us. Dad was mostly at work and wouldn’t really talk about it beyond telling us that it was going to be all right, while Mum was the complete opposite, crying and worrying and stressing. I talked to Emma-Jayne more than I talked to either our mum or dad, and she was the one who explained why we were going to have to go and live somewhere else. Mum says she cried all the way from our old house in Hertfordshire to our new one in Northamptonshire, which I don’t remember; what I do remember is Emma-Jayne saying, ‘As long as we’re still all together, nothing else matters.’ I think that comforted Mum a lot and it was what I felt as well, but it must have been awful for Dad. I’m sure Mum kept things from me and I know that our parents’ marriage went through a not very good patch after that.
Our new house, The Round House in Holcot, was the first in a long list of rented houses we ended up moving to – we must have changed address six times over the next ten years, depending on how well or badly my dad’s business was doing. Each time we went to a new place Mum would stay up all night, putting our things out so it would look like home when we came down in the morning, but I hated the feeling that nothing really belonged to us. Trying to find rented accommodation that would take all the animals was a big worry for Mum too, and when we couldn’t afford to rent houses with stables we had to find livery yards for the ponies, which was another cause of stress for her.
Right from the start, Mum told us that there was a chance we would have to sell our ponies. She also told us that she’d do everything she could to keep them and to make sure we could carry on competing. For all of us, including my dad, the ponies were our pride and joy, and having lost so much, I think both our parents wanted to make sure we didn’t have to give them up too. That meant there had to be other sacrifices. Millie was probably our greatest asset but my parents wanted to keep her so that I could have the same success on her that Emma-Jayne had had. (Because Emma-Jayne was older she had all our ponies first, then they were handed down to me when she outgrew them.) Millie was also good publicity for Debbie Thomas’s yard and Debbie very kindly agreed to pay her running costs so that we could still keep her there. My mum sold her car and my granddad also helped out financially, but it still wasn’t enough, so at that point we had to sell our nice horsebox.
Horseboxes are a big deal at competitions, and in the showing world there was so much money that people would often spend up to half a million on an Oakley lorry. They’d be like little houses when you went inside, with showers and toilets and pop-out living areas, so when we started rocking up in our little secondhand lorry, I felt a bit small. But Mum had always taught me it’s not what you arrive in, it’s what you go home with, and we were still the ones going home with the red rosettes. That was what used to make it feel worthwhile: all the dedication and the making do and the hours we put in. For me, being out there enjoying myself competing was always a release and relief from everything else that was going on, and yes, I’d wish we had a flash lorry or could afford to buy some of the amazing ponies the other kids had, but I tried to turn it round and use it as motivation to make the ponies I did have as good as I could. Looking back now, I think it also made me much more appreciative of things: I remember clearly Mum once telling me that it cost £50 to fill up our lorry with diesel, and it sinking in how much £50 actually was and how hard somebody had had to work to earn it.
The Round House was an old, converted mill. It had six stables and backed almost literally onto the M1: all that stood between you and the road was a field and a big grass embankment, which was meant to cut out some of the noise. Cantering up it was good fitness work for the horses, and it was also where we all went and stood as a family to throw flowers on Princess Diana’s funeral cortege as it drove past on 6 September 1997. (I remember the day we found out she’d died because I was made Supreme Champion on Millie at a British Show Pony Society show.)
While we were at The Round House my dad got back on his feet and started a new business, with my mum working for him. I also began following in my sister’s footsteps on Millie and together we won both the Royal International and the Horse of the Year Show. But then the inevitable happened and my parents were made an offer for her they couldn’t refuse.
Losing Millie was a huge blow for all of us. Even though she was so pretty, she was horrible in the stable: she’d bite and wind-suck and was generally not very nice to handle at all. She’d also managed to nearly knock my front teeth out: I’d fallen off her while I was riding bareback and she tried to jump me and whacked me square on. Mum rushed me to the emergency dentist who sat me in his chair, opened my mouth, said, ‘You’re not going to like this,’ and shoved my teeth back up into my head as hard as he could. ‘You’ll be all right as long as they don’t turn black,’ he said before Mum took me home, still trying to wipe the blood off. But for all that, Millie was an amazing little pony when you rode her: she knew her job and she never let you down.
Millie’s new owners were Australian. Until then, I hadn’t even realised that horses could travel that far, and I was terrified for her in case something happened to her on the flight. Mum did her best to reassure me, but we were all in tears when we said goodbye to Millie. She’d been such a huge part of our lives and given us all so much joy and pleasure and success.
Whenever one of our ponies was sold I cried myself to sleep, although it didn’t happen that often because my mum usually couldn’t bring herself to do it. But losing rides to other kids was something that I was used to: at Debbie Thomas’s I was always qualifying other people’s ponies for them to ride at big shows, and had to develop the mentality that it was what it was. My parents rarely kept me in the dark about money, and at the end of the day I realised that if you wanted to keep competing, you had to make sacrifices.
As I got older, I began to compete in more working hunter classes. Working hunters are still judged on their conformation, but you also have to jump a round of rustic fences like the obstacles you might come across out hunting.
When we’d been living at The Round House, one of the things that used to get me through the school day was evenings clear-round showjumping at Norton Heath Equestrian Centre in Blackmore.
Mum would make sure Dylan was ready when I got home and I’d rush back, whip off my school clothes, get all my riding gear on and jump in the lorry. I loved jumping and those evenings were great fun: you paid your £2 and each round the jumps got bigger and bigger, so the longer you stayed there, the higher you could jump.
Dylan had been a little Mountain and Moorland pony, but I now had a proper fourteen-hand working hunter, Enya. I was keen to get better at my jumping, and so Mum arranged for me to have some private lessons with the showjumper Tim Stockdale, who lived nearby.
Tim had first started showjumping for Britain in 1988, and went on to ride at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. He was also a prospect for London 2012, but then in 2011 he fell off a young horse and fractured his neck in three places. (Luckily he recovered and was back in the saddle four months later.)
Tim was no-nonsense, and a very, very tough coach. I liked tough because I was there to get better and being told what you’re doing wrong is the only way you’re ever going to improve, but I found Tim’s approach quite intimidating. At the age of twelve I wasn’t very good at talking to people I didn’t know very well, and Tim always wanted you to answer him, even if you didn’t know what the answer was. ‘Whether it’s right or wrong, give me an answer. Never just tell me you don’t know.’