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was more to it than that. I dreamed of riding, and jumping, even being a jockey. I found an old book on a shelf in Coddington Hall called
Great Ladies: The Wonder Fillies of History
, and kept it in my room, reading every night about horses who had raced years ago.
    When I went to my new school in the autumn, my thoughts were never far from Tinker and Lysander. In lessons, I was in a world of my own and drew pictures of ponies when I was meant to be working. For maths, I looked at the racing paper Uncle Bill received every day, and studied which horses ran best over what distance. I would have been the despair of the teachers, if it had not been for the big, dark shadow of personal tragedy that was hanging over me.
    Everyone thought that my obsession with riding and ponies was my way of escaping from the pain of what I was going through. It took most of that first year for them to discover that I wasn’t cracking up at all. Riding made me stronger. I was not running away from anything because every moment of every day my mother’s voice, one word at a time, was there with me, keeping me calm, reminding me that I was never truly alone.
    Leading.
    Me.
    Forward.

P RIVATE CHARITY CASE
    BY THE TIME I reach the end of my first year of pony-racing, a lot has changed.
    At my new school, there is no Michaela to be my friend and keep me supplied with second-hand cool and glamour. I am a misfit, even in sport. Because I am faster and stronger than boys of my age, they think I am weird, half-boy and half-girl. I have a nickname, ‘the Freak’. I am ‘Freaky Barton’.
    Michaela, on the other hand, is happy at her private school, Northfield Lodge. The two or three years when we were the Bartons, winning at the local gymkhanas, seem a long time ago. Something is different between us.
    Nothing alters more than her attitude to riding. At the very moment when I am becoming more interested in racing, she heads in the other direction. For her, ponies are for grooming and fussing over, for looking pretty and neat when we are out riding.
    I want to go fast and to win, and, now that I am winning, she finds that completely ridiculous.
    â€˜It is kind of weird how much coming first matters to you,’ she says in the strange, sing-song voice she seems to have picked up from her school. ‘I mean, there’s a whole world out there which has nothing to do with horses. Maybe you should try it some time.’
    For the briefest moment, I am about to try to explain to her how I feel, but it passes. No point. Waste of breath.
    We are drifting apart, my best friend and me. Pony-racing has toughened me up. I was never good at chat about parties or boys or celebrities, but there was a time when I used to try and tag along. Now I don’t bother. For Michaela, those things seem to matter more than ever. Almost every day, she tries to talk to me about something I don’t care about before giving up in despair. I have zero conversational skills, she says.
    Maybe it’s true. Two years ago, we talked all the time – Uncle Bill called us ‘the wall of sound’. Now we sometimes struggle to find anything we have in common.
    The days I spend racing with Uncle Bill make things worse. Michaela never mentions them, even when I have –
particularly
when I have – won, but I sense that it annoys her that I am doing something successful with her father in a world she doesn’t understand.
    In fact, my life at Coddington Hall is different all round. The more I talk and think about riding, the more I irritate my aunt. She jokes to her friends, ‘Jay might as well
be
a horse,’ and laughs in a slightly embarrassed way.
    These days Uncle Bill spends more time in his office. Sometimes he seems almost out of place when he is with Aunt Elaine and Michaela. If he is feeling brave, he might joke about how he’s not posh enough for them, with a little secret wink in my direction. He only truly relaxes when