Family fortunes

Down in his canal field on a damp November morning, Paul Webber’s horses were working in threes, hooves thudding into the resilient turf. This time it was Gift Voucher, Off Spin and Star Shot. ‘It’s such a lovely sound, horses galloping on good ground;’ declared the trainer, adding, ‘they can look good on the all-weather, but you get a much better idea whether a horse will stay on winter ground working it on grass.’

Paul’s wife Fiona watched on old Flying Instructor, once the stable star and winner of races like the Red Rum Martell Chase at Aintree, now the nearly white hack leading the string. Astride one Thelwell-style pony on a leading rein was five-year-old Hugo. Seven-year-old Sophie, self-announced as a future trainer, turned hers amid the wet tussocks of marsh grass. Work done, the horses circled the trainer for assessments before heading back over his sister’s farm to Cropredy Lawn, the training yard clustered around a 1780s farmhouse amid the rolling Oxfordshire countryside.

Beneath warm-red tiled roofs, hanging baskets were still blooming. Amid the bustle of stable life — brooms swishing, buckets filling, boxes being mucked out — the horses took a relaxing dip one by one through the swimming-pool before having their gleaming wet coats scraped down like West End shop windows. Why, I wondered, did anybody ever do any other job.

‘It is lovely,’ Paul agreed. ‘You get up in the morning and the horses are thrilled to see you — partly because they know they will be fed. Your hopes and dreams slowly come alive. There’s always something to look forward to, even when you’re at your most depressed.’ But there is, of course, a down side, too, particularly when horses are injured.