Clare Balding is adding to her achievements. The ex-professional jockey, and sports journalist has moved on from the Olympics and written her own book. Georgia Greenfield goes to the Ilkley Literature Festival to see what it’s all about.

My Animals and Other Family is a cheeky take on good-friend Gerald Durrell’s renowned autobiographical work My Family and Other Animals. Like the inspiration behind it, Balding’s account is a touching look at her childhood and her developing love of animals. The introduction says it all: ‘At a very young age I learnt to love and be loved, to trust and be trusted, and I learnt what loss was: all this I learnt from animals’.

Both in writing and in person, Balding describes the love between people and animals as a kind of unbreakable loyalty – a primal connection void of complications and fall-outs and instead simple and permanent. Illustrating it is a wonderful photograph of a one-year-old Balding, protected from the photographer by the family’s ‘matriarchal’ boxer, Candy. Balding’s story firmly backs the belief that animals and children can have a very positive partnership.

Balding comes from an incredibly wealthy background but appears to have a complete lack of snobbishness which makes the work of this national treasure all the more enjoyable. Another childhood photograph shows Balding on top of Mill Reef, the million-pound racehorse, who after his career-ending injury, could only bear the weight of a child. ‘I was technically the last person ever to ride Mill Reef!’ jokes Balding.

Having a father who trained horses for the Queen, Balding was consistently around members of the royal family and the experience makes for some unmatchable anecdotes. She recalls being given her first horse, Valkyrie, by the Queen herself, and once stumbled in to the royal dining room when teenager only to find the Queen herself having breakfast. According to Balding she attempted to help herself to to breakfast, fell, and saw ‘a sausage flying in the direction of the Queen’.

In many parts My Animals and Other Families is a hilarious tale, full of heart-warming anecdote. Balding wanted her writing to have her audience ‘laughing, crying, and connecting’ to her story, and that she certainly achieves.

 

My Animals and Other Family is out now from Viking.

Thank you also to the Ikley Literature Festival for their accommodation. All information for events is available at www.ilkleyliteraturefestival.org.uk/