Galloping through
Reviewed by Valerie Grove
Hodder & Stoughton £20
Despite her youth – she is not much past forty – Clover Stroud’s account of romantic adventures, rhapsodising dark strangers in exotic lands, are sensuously reminiscent of Lesley Blanch’s classic The Wilder Shores of Love (1954).
Clover was born in 1975, and enjoyed a childhood blessed with ponies and outdoor freedom, presided over by her mother, Charlotte (always known as Char), and father Rick Stroud. Their Wiltshire farmhouse was filled with the aroma of baking bread and the sound of merriment fuelled by copious bottles of red wine at their kitchen table, among friends from the exciting worlds of advertising and film.
Being addicted to fun, feasting, love and laughter, and having three children from her first marriage and two daughters from her second (Clover being the youngest), Char ‘created enchantment’ for everyone.
But all this ended on 25th November 1991, when she was thrown from her horse while out riding and suffered a catastrophic blow to the head. The accident ‘turned the spotlight off’, leaving Clover, still a schoolgirl, with ‘a jagged dark scar’ dividing her life into before and after.
Readers may recognise this saga, already told by Clover’s half-sister Emma Bridgewater, creator of beautiful kitchenware, and by her sister Nell, creator of Giffords Circus. There was also a TV documentary.
But this memoir contains the most graphic account of Charlotte Stroud’s two decades of living death. It is a comfortless tale. Recovery from coma was followed by pointless surgical procedures that failed to stall her disintegration into speechless dementia, epilepsy and incontinence.
Clover, who had been telepathically close to her mother, saw motherhood as her own destiny. But, when she presents her first baby to Char in her care home, she is angrily spurned.
As a bereft teenager, Clover’s first consolation was her consuming passion for the horse. Her childhood pony Pudding was a refuser at jumps, so she won prizes for ‘most determined rider’ and the accolade was appropriate, given her fearless sense of indestructibility.
Her life has taken some reckless turns since then: a wild child in high boots and flowery frocks, dropping acid with New Age travellers and having a lot of random sex. Always yearning to be astride a horse, she took to jockeying at Lambourn, then to the gypsy life and horse fairs in Galway, then to the mysterious Ridgeway in boyfriend Brad’s barrel-top wagon, where freedom meant vodka, amphetamines and cooking over campfires.
At Oxford (her place there seems effortlessly won), she had first encountered ‘Dublin Dan’: an appealing but fake Irishman, who drank and gambled and was later to marry her and father her first two children.
The next escape was to West Texas, where she had only to lean on a bar and ‘a stranger in a Stetson would ask me to dance’. Stetson-hatted Shay picked her up in his pick-up truck: ‘Spend the night with me,’ he said, and she does. Breaking a bronco, she earns her spurs (and still has them, a memento of Texas days.)
Only horses, she knew, could take her into dangerous places, where she could feel close to her mother, ‘since what I really craved was to find her’.
After Dublin Dan, an even more exotic lover heaved into view: a flashing-eyed Cossack horseman, performing in her sister’s circus. Once he had taken a knife and mixed the blood of their thumbs, off Clover trotted (packing frothy underwear, miniskirts and high-heeled boots) to his wild Caucasian homeland, where of course she eventually discovered he had a wife and two-year-old twins.
Time shifts back and forth but ultimately Clover, courageous and vulnerable, is grounded in a second marriage to an old soulmate named Pete. They have more babies who at first make her feel suffocated by motherhood.
Finally, with Charlotte’s death, comes real grief at last. At the funeral, ‘She was an easy person to eulogise’, writes Clover. The subsequent death of Candida Lycett Green, a close friend of Char, galvanises Clover into finding a house near where Candida raised her own brood, under the White Horse at Uffington, a folkloric legend whose equine spirit runs at a gallop through Clover’s vivid, breathtaking escapades. Of which I hope to read more, in time.
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