‘My mum taught me to grab life by the reins’
Clover Stroud’s picture-perfect childhood was shattered when a devastating riding accident left her mother severely brain-damaged. But rather than turn her back on horses, Clover reveals how they became her focus and her escape
One woman reveals how she coped when her mother had a tragic accident
‘When I want to go back in time, to the safe embrace of the past where nothing bad has yet happened, I take myself to a moment when I was seven years old. I’m walking out of school when I see my mum leading a horse, my pony Twiglet, on a coloured rope. She has walked from our house across the field with the pony so that, instead of getting the rattling village bus home, as I did every day, I could ride there. If I listen hard enough, I can hear her voice as she calls out to me, laughing at the surprise she’s created. I can see her smile and her brown hair falling in waves across her face. I can feel the quiet reassurance of her beside me, as she takes my school bag and gives me a leg up into the saddle. I can taste the honey sandwiches she made for us to eat on the way.
Arriving to pick me up from school with a pony was the kind of thing Mum did without thinking. I’m the youngest of five children, with three older sisters and one older brother, and without seeming to try, Mum created a childhood for us that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a picture book. We’d moved from Oxford to the Gloucestershire countryside, and city pavements and trips to the park were exchanged for the dens me and my older sister Nell built in the waist-high hay fields around the house, or riding our ponies through bluebell woods.
With Dad often in London working, it was Mum who became the centre of our world. Sometimes I found myself wishing she was more like the other mums at the school gate, who wore neat clothes and knew the names of all the teachers. She wore the wide-brimmed hats and long stripy skirts she’d been wearing since the 1960s. Her dog, Piper, was rarely away from her side, and she adored horses. She wanted us to enjoy them, too, and recognised that they could give us a sense of independence.
What Mum did best, though, was to love us. Her love flooded around me like warm light, protecting me from anything that was bad or frightening. I imagined a grown-up life where I would have children of my own, and she’d love them just as fiercely. I wanted to be with her all the time, and I thought I would be. But although Mum made so many of my dreams real, she couldn’t shelter me from the nightmare that would shatter life as I knew it.
I was 16, and just starting to study for my A levels when, one November morning, Mum dropped me off at school before going out for a ride.
Within the space of a few hours, life changed in the most catastrophic and violent way. Sometime after leaving me, Mum fell from her horse and, although she was wearing
a riding hat, suffered a massive blow to her head.
I remember vividly that evening we spent with her in the intensive care ward of a Bristol hospital. She was unconscious, her head horribly swollen with horrific bruises, her virtually lifeless body hooked up to tubes and monitors that bleeped.
When she slowly awoke, about three months later, the extent of her brain damage became clear to us. She was doubly incontinent, and developed epilepsy and eczema that reacted all over her body. Worst of all, she’d lost the ability to speak, to write, even to understand anything.
Coming to terms with sudden brain damage in someone you love is a terrifying experience. I longed for normality; to be able to come home from school to find Mum there; to sit at the kitchen table and do my homework while she cooked lasagne; to share a joke with her about something funny that had happened that day.
Instead, the beautiful home my parents had created for us became a hospital. Mum was looked after by carers, and existed on a cocktail of drugs. I got used to changing her pads, and trying to teach her how to speak again before getting on with my homework. But slowly it became clear that she needed specialist medical help. Just after I finished my A levels, she moved into a full-time residential rehabilitation clinic, and then later into nursing care.
I visited Mum regularly, but the pain was like a boulder that I could never put down. I missed her intensely, but also felt painfully guilty that my life was going on while she couldn’t talk, walk, or enjoy anything. What saved me, I think, were horses. In one sense, horses had destroyed my life, and yet this only bound me tighter to them. To give them up would have been to allow the accident – and all the endless trauma and grief it brought with it – to win.
As my twenties and thirties unfolded, horses became my escape. I worked for a racehorse trainer, lived with gypsies in Ireland, and travelled to Texas to work as a cowgirl on a ranch. I wanted galloping horses, bucking horses, horses that made my heart beat faster. It was as if I wanted to defy fate; to remind myself that, although Mum was lost, I was still alive, and I had to grab life by the reins.
Some people might call this selfish, but it was to be my survival technique; my way of processing my grief for a mother who was not dead, but nowhere to be found.
Still, for all of the recklessness of some of the life choices I’ve made, I know the accident has also inspired me to live in the moment. My first marriage failed, leaving me a single mother to a toddler and a baby by the age of 28. But I remarried in my thirties, and now have five children, aged from six months to 16.
Over the years, visiting Mum was never easy. Often she’d simply look away when she saw me, and at other times she’d make strange groaning noises, as if I somehow reminded her of the life that she’d lost. But through it all, she was still Mum, and when, in 2013 – more than two decades after she fell from her horse – she died, the pain was extraordinary.
Two years ago, we moved to a village beneath Uffington White Horse, the beautiful, 3,000-yearold chalk horse etched on to the hillside in Oxfordshire. The ancient landmark inspired me to explore the journey of Mum’s accident more deeply, and I’ve written a memoir, The Wild Other, about living with the trauma of what happened. Writing has helped me come to terms with my grief. It’s allowed me to sit with my memories, and to enjoy the happier times we spent together.
I know that Mum would be tremendously proud of her grandchildren. I will forever feel sad that my children never really knew the extraordinary woman Mum was, but in my way, I hope I’m showing them – through my love for them, and through the horses I am raising them to love.’
‘Horses had destroyed my life, but this only bound me tighter to them’