Learning to ride, not to cook.

My mother felt that learning to ride well was an important skill. Not just learning to ride but learning to ride well. She herself was dressed in jodhpurs and teeny tiny riding boots right from the start.

When my father was creating The Grove, the house my mother still lives in today, she suggested to him that the stable block was finished first, so the horses could be moved into their new home even whilst we still camped amid packing crates.

Every morning my mother would climb the mounting block with her hair chicly wrapped in a scarf and whenever I was home from school I would ride with her through the countryside, surprising the red kites who would spring up from the clearings in front of us, whistling in such a way we wondered if it was in fact the noise of poachers. My father, when he found the time, would join us, dapperly dressed in a bowler hat and double-breasted jacket or a Spanish riding hat and silk cravat. Riding was our shared language.

So, you may imagine my delight when Penny Chilvers asked me to lightly redesign her often imitated, but never surpassed handmade Tassel Boots, the epitome of luxury, now freshly launched in slate grey, with the finest of detailing seen in contrasting pale dove-egg blue reminding me of those early misty morning rides around the Grove countryside.

My mother remembers that her greatest riding moment came, not when she won the Ladies Race in Malta in the 1940’s, quite an achievement, but during the war….