#rtml

I have caused some apprehension to Clerks of the Course from Hamilton in Scotland to Folkestone in the south of England, from Devon and Exeter in the west to Huntingdon in the east, regarding the state of their lady jockeys' changing rooms. There was a considerable discrepancy in the standards of those facilities. The Clerks are responsible to the Jockey Club for the condition of the individual racecourse and some had not had to cope with many lady jockeys. Suffice to say that if I have achieved nothing else in my racing career, I have got the ladies some new loos!

I have some very amusing memories and there is one in particular that always makes me smile. Do you remember the Hamlet Cigar advertisements? A few months after my first race, I rode a charming little horse called French Union in a flat race at Chepstow. Trained by David Nicholson, he had been bought to go National Hunt racing, but David thought that a run on the flat would do him good before he ran over hurdles. I was allowed to ride him because I had been riding him a lot at Condicote. We knew he had raced in Ireland before he came over, but nobody knew if he had run from stalls. He had been perfectly good in 'the Duke's' version, so we weren't too worried.

Getting changed was a careful ritual and once again, with Dinah's help, I hadn't forgotten anything. An important piece of equipment was the body protector, which was to become compulsory not only for [National Hunt] jockeys but also for riders in UK horse trials. In spite of some early skepticism and feelings of discomfort - I felt I looked like the Incredible Hulk - everybody has come to appreciate their value.

I made my way back to the start-and-finish box hanging on to the nearside stirrup leather with my right hand, because my right leg wasn't working very well. By the time I got back to the stables, the feeling was returning to my leg. But the end of my collar bone was causing me very serious pain and it appears that I had been very lucky (a) not to have broken my collar bone, and (b) not to have dislocated it.

I was, of course, treated exactly the same as any other team member, which wasn't too difficult as nobody in Kiev knew what I looked like, even if they had somehow discovered that I was there. Well, that was what we all thought until I was accosted by the floor maid in the hotel corridor, while attempting to do some ironing. She watched me for a moment before approaching me with outstretched arms, chattering away in Russian and then planting three of the wettest, smelliest kisses on my cheeks that I have ever encountered. I have to admit that she might have mistaken me for somebody else, somebody more famous like Lucinda Prior-Palmer for instance, but then we shall never know.

Once upon a time there was a small girl of two-ish, who was placed on an almost equally small bundle of cream hair called Fum. What followed was a direct result of that apparently successful encounter and of being born into a family of talented equestrians (horse riders) and brought up in a lifestyle in which the horse played an integral part. My earliest memories of ponies, horses and riding are seriously confused by photographs, so that I can no longer differentiate between memories of events or photographs of the same events. Everywhere there were animals, horses, dogs, cows, sheep, pigs, and life was very country- and farm-orientated. The countryside was Berkshire, Norfolk and Aberdeenshire, a wonderful variety of farming and wildlife observed largely from the back of a pony or horse. Only later did I fully appreciate the luxury of growing up in those surroundings. Only later did I realise that all I had subconsciously learnt - and had assumed everyone else knew - was in fact unknown to, or not appreciated by, a very large number of people. Things like where your daily pint of milk originally came from, that peas came out of a pod and not a tin, and the responsibility of looking after another living thing.

Rumours and stories of bugged rooms with which we had been regaled by the Moscow veterans were tested by my policeman, who more or less took his room to pieces, including removing the mirror from the wall which he then had great difficulty in putting back. He did find a device eventually, in the telephone. As telephoning was a long-winded and expensive business, I doubt if 'they' heard anything very interesting.