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If you don't know who Clare Balding is you've probably been locked in a dungeon without access to TV or radio, as she is at the forefront of BBC sports coverage and TV and radio broadcasting this year. Brought up in an unusual household (her father being a champion racehorse trainer), she and her younger brother spent their childhood among horses, ponies and foals, as well as an ever-present pack of lurchers and boxers, and came very low down the pecking order. In this moving, skilfully written and very funny childhood memoir, Clare Balding describes her journey to self-discovery in a family who's running joke was, 'women ain't people.'
Synopsis
I had spent most of my childhood thinking I was a dog, and suspect I had aged in dog years. By the time I was ten I had discovered the pain of unbearable loss. I had felt joy and jealousy. Most important of all, I knew how to love and how to let myself be loved. All these things I learnt through animals. In this title, the author tells her story.
Book Details
Publisher:
VIKING
Publication Date:
13-Sep-2012
ISBN:
9780670921461
Observer review
My Animals and Other Family by Clare Balding review
Alexander Larman the observer Sat 15 September 2012
Clare Balding is currently riding a wave of popular acclaim thanks to her hugely successful hosting of the Olympics and Paralympics, and so her Gerald Durrell-referencing memoir couldn't be published at a more apposite moment. The titular animals are her dogs and horses, and as she describes her surprisingly privileged upbringing (her first horse, Valkyrie, was a gift from the Queen), she conveys the excitements and difficulties of a childhood where her horse-trainer father and put-upon mother seemed to take second place to their vast and spoilt menagerie. It's an engaging read but those who are fanatical about horses are likely to get more out of it than casual admirers of Balding. It's telling that the book stops in 1990, with her subsequent life relegated to a postscript, and her description of her realisation of her sexuality is a typically brisk "I realised I'd been looking in the wrong section of the library". The reader may hope that a subsequent, more forthcoming memoir continues her story in greater detail.
