Time & Place: My training started early

My father would say: “If you have an animal, it’s your responsibility.” I had horses, which continue to be my passion.

So mornings would involve getting up to sort out the horses before even contemplating going to school. Evenings, of course, also involved looking after the horses.

It wasn’t just horses, as I helped with the dairy herd and other animals, including sheep. That continued until I was 27, when I had gained my licence as a trainer. Until then, I worked on the farm and was an amateur jockey.

I wanted a pony almost from the time I could walk. I was about eight years old when my father bought me my first pony, which coincided with our move to the farm. My father was a milkman and he bought the farm — it was actually his second, his first having been bought between him and his brothers — to build the dairy business.

My overwhelming memory of living there is the great fun we had riding horses across the fields, without a care in the world.

There was also the fascination of seeing the farmhouse being developed, because when we initially moved there, it was tiny. My mother and father built a large extension.

Being in the middle of a moor, it was a beautiful, quiet place to live. In winter it would get quite cold. It certainly sharpened you up.

Back then, winters were fiercer than they are now — sometimes you would struggle to get out of the back door because there was a 4ft snow drift.

To start with, the house had two bedrooms, a dining room, a lounge, bathroom and a small kitchen, but the extension added considerably to the space. It was great fun watching the extension being built. You were involved, in so far as you worked on the farm every day. It was just a lovely way of life. The nearest neighbour was a cottage 400 yards down the road and the nearest towns were Eaglesham and East Kilbride. Although I like a bit of company, I do love being in a place so isolated, free of annoying traffic.

While the extension allowed me to have my own bedroom, I was a classic case of being an outdoors person. My attitude towards my bedroom was essentially that it was where I went to sleep — I didn’t really spend much time in it.

The pictures I had on the wall of my bedroom were of horses and all the ornaments I had were also horses. I used to collect Beswick china horses — I still have some of them, even if they are missing the odd leg.

A much more important room was the lounge, which was the centre of what was a happy home life. It was simply a joy to be at home with my parents and my brother.

But the reality is that if you live on a working farm there is always so much to be done and you are outside for a considerable amount of time.

It was by no means inevitable that I would end up being a horseracing trainer, however.

Obviously, I loved horses. Every day, from when I was quite young, I was looking after them and riding them. And, when I got older, I fancied competing as an amateur jockey, which meant that I earned no money. But I wanted a crack at becoming a trainer and, when I did, I became one of the youngest women trainers in Britain.

That said, when I was thinking about it as a career path, pretty much everybody tried to put me off, except my father, who backed me. Bank managers, for one, were certainly not very interested in helping me out, so I had to find all the money I needed from other sources.

This last season wasn’t too bad. We had a rough start, with a virus going around the stables, which meant that we couldn’t run the horses for about two-and-a-half months.

But the back end of the season was good. Ahead of this season you think — as you do at the start of every season — that everything is going to be wonderful.