Elli was recovering I got Tammy, a four-year-old bay whose broad brown flanks have an orange glow in the sun. Tammy was much more highly strung than Elli. Nervous around other horses, she would bare her teeth if she got scared, but she was willing and bold and she learned new tricks really fast.
Tammy was so unpredictable that at competitions she would either come first or be disqualified after terrifying the audience by rearing or trashing the jumps. I was never scared with her because I’d been around horses for ten years when I got her, and I had a Saturday job in which I trained difficult and young horses. I also had a bum like glue, so I seldom fell off her, even when she was misbehaving. Elli became the one horse Tammy trusted, and by the time I left for college Tammy and Elli were sharing a field at the stables up the road from us and were happy in one another’s company. I knew I’d miss them dreadfully, but I planned to get home as often as possible, and I arranged to loan them out to other riders so that they’d be exercised.
Once I decided that I wanted to be a vet there was no stopping me. I worked incredibly hard to make the A-level grades I needed, and Dad and I went to look around potential vet schools.
There were seven veterinary colleges I could apply to (there are eight now), but the moment I saw it my heart was set on the Royal Veterinary College. With two campuses, in Camden and Hertfordshire, it has fantastic teaching facilities, including the Queen Mother Hospital for Animals, its own Equine Centre and its own first-opinion practice. So I was heartbroken when they turned me down. I decided to call them and find out why, and when I was told it was because I didn’t have physics GCSE I told them that there had been a mistake, because I did have it. I begged for an interview, but they said the interviews were almost over. Eventually they relented and said I could come on the last day of interviews, for the final appointment of the day.
I did and I was accepted. But as I was right at the end of the interviews, all the places had already been allocated for that September and so I was offered one for the following year. That was fine with me; I was prepared to wait and I decided to spend my gap year working and travelling.
A year later, when I walked through the doors of the RVC’s Camden campus to start my course, I felt ready to take on whatever the college was going to throw at me over the next five years. I knew that by the end I would need to know how to do everything – diagnosis, treatment and surgery – on any animal at any time, anywhere, from a well-equipped surgery to a grubby barn, and I couldn’t wait to get going.
For the first two years we were based in Camden before transferring to the Hawkshead campus in Potters Bar, Hertfordshire, for the final three years. And until the spring term of our fourth year everything went smoothly. My days were filled with lectures, essays and studying dry bones, specimens in bottles, X-rays, plastic models and charts. Everything, in fact, but live animal cases.
We knew that was coming, of course, but it didn’t seem real until, one bleak January day in 2013, all 250 of us in the year group were gathered together in the lecture theatre by our Vice Principal, David Church, a charismatic Australian who was passionate about getting the best out of his students. He was a genius, and incredibly intimidating for that reason, but we’d come to realise that ultimately he was on our side and always put the health and welfare of the students above everything else.
That January morning he looked around the auditorium at a sea of expectant faces. ‘This is the start of the rest of your lives. It’s time to put everything you’ve learned into practice,’ he announced. ‘You’re going to go out there and be vets, and you’ll be expected to know your stuff and get it right. You’re not students now, you’re colleagues of the vets you’ll be working with, part of the team, and you’ll be expected to know what to do.’
I was sitting to one side of the lecture theatre with my housemates, Andrew, James, Kevin and John, plus James’s girlfriend Hannah, who was a semi-permanent fixture in our house. Lucy was in the row behind. We always chose a spot well out of David Church’s direct eye line because he tended to pick on students and ask them alarming questions.
I turned to Lucy. ‘Are you feeling as nervous as I am?’ I whispered.
‘More,’ she replied. ‘I’m actually about to be sick.’
I looked over at the boys. Andrew looked cool and calm. He never seemed to get excited or nervous about anything, and was incredibly steady. Kevin looked worried and James even more so, but John looked excited. He couldn’t wait to get stuck in.
The five of us couldn’t have been more different. Goodness knows how we ended up sharing a house together, but after a year in student accommodation we’d opted to move into a small house in Camden in our second year, and we’d decided to stay together when we moved to Hertfordshire in our third. We’d been lucky with the house we found as the owners were going abroad and, amazingly, didn’t mind letting to students.
Being the only girl I’d bagged the best room. But for the boys the room that mattered was the kitchen, and this one had two ovens and six hobs. Food wasn’t a priority for me. I tried to keep my food budget to £10 a week and ate whatever was on offer at the supermarket so that I could save for other things, but the four boys were all big eaters.
James loved to cook and had an entire rack of spices. At weekends you’d find him creating gourmet dishes like pulled pork and fennel or Thai green curry to share with Hannah. He had a slow cooker and would put a casserole on in the morning to be ready for when he came back in the evening.
Andrew was stick thin but could pile away more food than anyone I’d ever seen; he liked substantial dishes like spaghetti with meatballs or big roasts. He’d eat a huge plateful and be back for more two hours later.
Kevin and John were both from the States, but that was all they had in common. Kevin was from South Carolina and was an outdoor, baseball and hiking kind of guy who loved his steak, burger and fries. Top of his list was grits, or ground corn; it was his staple diet and he’d bring back bags of the stuff every time he went to the States. We all thought it was just like Italian polenta that you can get in a lot of supermarkets, but Kevin insisted that they weren’t the same at all and he had to have the authentic Yankee version from home.
Every Halloween his parents would send over a bulk order of candy corn, which tastes like fudge, comes in the shape of sweetcorn and is orange and white. We loved it and dug into the huge jar every time we passed.
While Kevin missed the wide open spaces of America, John was a city guy from New York. Neat, clean and organised, he kept his room pristine and tidied up after all of us. John loved English culture, he thought the English were terribly polite and he loved traditions like afternoon tea. He shipped his Mini Cooper over from the States because he didn’t want to drive any other car, and he liked to make himself fancy dishes like chicken salad with pomegranate seeds and feta. He also made bread, enough for all of us, and on the days when I had no time or money for anything else his fresh bread kept me going.
All the boys were in different groups and on a different rotation schedule to mine, so I was grateful for Lucy. An hour after David Church’s talk we sat in the canteen, going through our rotations timetables. Altogether we would be going through sixteen different core rotations, some a week long, some two weeks. The essential ones would include farm animal medicine, first-opinion practice (which means being part of a local veterinary practice), equine medicine, and specialist areas such as neurology, surgery, anaesthesia and orthopaedics. In addition we would have three fortnights in which we could choose our own rotation electives, and sixteen weeks in which we were expected to carry out work experience, which we had to set up ourselves. We’d started writing to practices months earlier, asking if they would accept us for work experience, which had to fit into the gaps between the required college rotations. It was enough to make the most confident student’s head spin.
‘Horses
