Riding the storm

Clover Stroud opens her memoir with the crippling bout of post-natal depression that hit after the birth of her fourth child. ‘I felt like a fist. Dash was always naked, plastered bare to my breast, sucking from me as my body dripped milk and tears.’ She even contemplates harming the baby then killing herself, guilelessly telling the health visitor: ‘But isn’t that normal?’ We spiral back in time to the cataclysmic events that spurred Stroud’s distress.

Stroud’s life was idyllic up to the age of 16. Home was a rambling country house in the village of Minety, Wiltshire, filled with adorable siblings and presided over by her father Rick, a TV executive, and her exuberant earth mother Charlotte. Horse-mad from an early age, Stroud was not to know that her keenest passion was to turn into the family curse. At the age of 52, the vibrant Charlotte is thrown from her horse and suffers a catastrophic brain injury. Defying the medical prognosis, she regains consciousness, but is incontinent, barely able to speak and never again becomes the woman they all loved so much, and the mother that the teenage Stroud needed so desperately.

Curiously, this disaster doesn’t put Stroud off horses; on the contrary, their danger, their wildness — the untameable ‘wild other’ of the title — becomes all the more alluring. Even her fourth child’s name, Dash, shortened from Dashiell, was also the name of a much-loved pony. The accident seems to beckon Stroud on to flirt with danger and death, to ride as hard and fast as she can. The book charts a journey that takes her from English racing stables to Texan ranches and on to the most perilous emotional and physical states she can access.