Horse riding took my mother's life - but it saved me
I was 16 when I lost my mother. She had been riding her horse, Quince, on an old airfield near Kemble in Gloucestershire when he slipped on concrete and threw her to the ground, hard. She had been wearing a riding hat but it offered little protection from the force of the fall. She was 52.
My mother hadn’t died in the accident, nor even broken a bone. But a light had been turned out: when she slowly awoke after several months in a coma, the extent to which her life had changed became clear.
A first, she could walk with help and feed herself, and there were some automatic impulses that she seemed to recall, like pouring a cup of tea. It didn’t matter that she would then try and drink every drop of it from the pot: the fact that she was mobile made us optimistic that with our loving care she would get better.
My elder brother, three elder sisters and I would change her incontinence pads, hold her arm as she walked and tried to help her to learn to speak again. But she was very confused, no longer the strong, loving woman she had been. And looking after her was hard - not least because she had developed a series of medical issues including epilepsy since her fall.
Yet the physical challenges were easier to manage than the fact she could not talk, or communicate in any way. It was impossible to tell what she understood, or whether she recognised who any of us were. After two years, it became clear she needed full time, specialist nursing care. Our home was sold, and Mum moved first to a residential rehabilitation centre, and then to a full-time nursing home.
Visiting Mum was only ever sad. I would go and see her as often as I could manage it - sometimes a couple of times a month, and sometimes two or three months passed when I didn’t see her. I felt so sorry for the broken woman she had become, but I also missed my mother, the person who had bathed me in the light of her love, and wanted her back so much. I struggled to understand where she was, since she was not dead, but it did not feel like she was alive, either.
Sometimes I imagined her soul, swirling around in the universe around me, and at other times I thought it might be deep down in a hidden part of her heart. Mum was cared for beautifully by nurses and died 22 years after the accident, in 2013, when I was 38.
What happened to her was strange and violent. She had run a big home, had lots of children, enjoyed life outdoors and riding her horses. Within the course of one afternoon that happy, secure home life ended. Mum’s suspended death in life meant that even though she was gone after the accident, the rituals of grief were deprived from us. I could not mourn someone who was still physically there.
Sometimes I felt driven mad by the unending nature of the accident’s consequences. In the years that followed, and especially when I visited Mum, the shrill disorientation of fresh grief was always just below the surface, waiting to rear up at me when I thought of her, or caught sight of something - a coat like one she had worn, a toy similar to one she had given me – that reminded me of her.
Now that Mum is dead, I understand the grieving process a little more clearly. For over two decades I was stuck on a merry go round swinging between the five stages of grief that Elizabeth Kubler-Ross identified: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, which was always just out of reach. If grief is heavy and deadening, then trauma is a restless, almost kinetic, emotion to live with.
I anaesthetised myself against the pain with wild men and wild behaviour, until I realised I could not retreat from the accident, but had to turn around and face it down. Mum’s fall had happened when she was riding; common sense might have determined that after such a catastrophic experience, I’d give up horses altogether. Instead I returned, as it were, to the scene of the crime.
“Why do you still ride?” is a question I’ve been asked many times. But riding helped me feel closer to that warm, wonderful woman when I really didn’t know where to find her, and that made me feel less afraid, too. On a horse I was never a victim, only a warrior.
Immediately after leaving school, I worked for a racehorse trainer near Marlborough. I lived in a windswept concrete room on the edge of the racing yard, galloping several horses every day across the Ridgeway. It was exhausting, badly paid work and I loved every moment of it. I’d grown up riding scruffy ponies, but that was my first experience of leggy, hysterical, extraordinary thoroughbreds, the highly-strung machines that are unlike any other sort of beast. Galloping a thoroughbred is like a shot of adrenaline straight into the heart, and that felt like therapy.
I was 18 and felt almost fearless - I had immunity, I told myself, as lightning doesn’t strike twice. As I rushed across the open fields, the thunder of hooves beneath me, I dared the past catch to up with me.
My adventures with horses continued in my late teens when I moved to Ireland, a country I’d fallen in love with at 15 when I went on a riding holiday with Mum to Galway. I worked, disastrously, as a waitress in Dublin, before moving to its west coast and travelling with a horse drawn wagon which belonged to a boyfriend. Trading horses with gypsies, living on verges and riding to raves at midnight were a good distraction from the dangerous edge where the thought of Mum existed.
After university, a weakness for cowboys and country music sent me to Texas, where I talked my way onto a ranch so I could learn how to rope and brand and break in unbroken three year olds. I shunned helmets and back protectors - I wanted to feel the danger that I imagined used to course through Mum’s veins, too.
I came back to England two years later and had two children in my mid-twenties, but horses always enticed me back, however much I tried to resist them. I taught my children to ride, keeping a pony on a field behind some allotments so that they could trot to the corner shop to buy sweets.
Two years ago, having remarried and had three more children, we moved out of Oxford to a village close to the Uffington White Horse on the Oxfordshire downs. The Ridgeway running from Avebury towards the Chilterns is dotted with long barrows and ancient burial grounds, but the 3000-year-old figure of a chalk horse galloping across the hill is the jewel in this landscape. It is a strange, almost geometric shape, its lines echoing the fluidity of the rolling downs around it.
I am not sentimental about the animals themselves; it is the bravery and resilience they’ve helped me to find - horses, more than anything, have taught me that there’s no such thing as a knight in shining armour, no magical fix when things go wrong other than embracing that which scares you most. It’s a lesson my mother passed down to me, and one I hope my children will learn, too.
The Wild Other, by Clover Stroud, is published by Hodder & Stoughton (£20). To order your copy for £16.99, plus p&p, call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk
