'It's the bottle or me'

It is so dark and foggy at 6.45am that I am sure, as I drive through Berkshire towards Wantage, staring out at this impenetrable morning, that I am never going to find Henrietta Knight's racing stable.

I had talked to her the day before and she had said merrily: "Right, I'll see you at the yard at around seven," ringing off before I'd asked her where she actually lived. When I called back she seemed vaguely surprised that I didn't know.

"You need to get onto the 417 and then turn right."

"Left," said a male voice in the background; "Oh, that's right, left," she said, "and then you can't miss us!" Just as I am about to get mildly panicked, I see the left-hand turn. I drive down the hill and right in front of me is a huge barn lit up by very strong lights. There, with their lovely faces nodding away out of the windows, are more horses than I've ever set eyes upon.

Somewhere among these equine giants is Best Mate. This is the horse that catapulted Henrietta Knight into the limelight. Before the stunning success of this beautiful horse - he has won two Gold Cups back to back for the first time in 32 years, and is trying for a third at the Cheltenham Festival next March - Knight was just one of a handful of female trainers trying to make their way in a male world.

At this time Knight was known only within the industry. She was, she tells me later, considered "rather unconventional". She treats her horses like pets or even people. She has no children. Her husband, former champion jockey Terry Biddlecombe, calls her his "barren mare".

Her whole life centres on her horses. "Other trainers complain I treat my horses with kid gloves," she says, "but I truly think about their needs. If I think they need the feel of turf beneath their feet, then I gallop them through fields. I react to what the horse is telling me."

Now Best Mate has his own website and fan page and more than 5,000 people came to her stable open day in September to see him. "Yes, it's marvellous," says Knight, "but also terrifying because Terry and I have now become public property. People come down to see Matey all the time and I get endless requests for him to open fêtes and appear in charity races. He's a serious racehorse. He is in training and he cannot do any of these things. I worry about him all the time. I am a natural-born worrier."

This morning, once I have found Knight among the chickens and geese and all the stable staff who are moving around the yard like wraiths in the half-light, she is worrying again. "I've so much to do," she says. "We're going racing at Ascot later and this afternoon we're going to Kempton to test the ground."

The world is still waiting to hear if Best Mate will run in the King George at Kempton on Boxing Day. Knight has said she will make her decision on Tuesday. I tell her I was there last year to see him win.

"Did you see his owner, Jim Lewis?" she asks me. "He loves the attention. He's supported me for a long time but he doesn't come to see his horses here very much. I am very superstitious. I like to keep him away. Anyway, in the collecting ring he was chatting to people and slapping a horse on the back, saying, 'Here's my Matey!' and I had to tell him it wasn't Matey at all but another horse called Lord Noelie!"

Then she leaps into her 4x4, followed by two dogs, and says: "Let's go!" As she drives up to the gallops, she tells me she has lived in the village of West Lockinge all her life, as did her mother, Hester. "My mother was a marvellous woman," she says, as the car swerves from one patch of skidding mud to the next.

It was her mother who instilled a passion for horses in the young Henrietta. "She used to breed Shetland ponies," says Knight. "When I was a child she used to let me ride all the time. I'd ride off over the Berkshire Downs at dusk after school. No child would be allowed to do that now. But it gave me a great sense of freedom."

It also sparked off in her something her years as a debutante in London could not dampen. "I hated the parties," she says, "but I liked meeting people. I think it's helped me understand all sorts of people and their motivations, which is a useful skill for a racehorse trainer."

Now we are at the top of a hill and the fog is fading and a sliver of sunshine breaking through. Suddenly horses appear out of nowhere, prancing and cavorting all over the place. They run and race and fly up the field in small groups of two and three, and all the time Knight zooms backwards and forwards in her car shouting: "There's Foly Pleasant. Lovely horse. Look at Rosslea! He's on his toes!" And on it goes until the very last racing machine has streaked past us. "I love seeing that," says Knight. "I just always love watching my horses."

All of this very nearly didn't happen. Henrietta Knight may be just about as English and as well bred as they come - her father was in the Army and then became a farmer, her sister Ce is married to Lord Vestey - but this did not mean she was given a shoe-in into the racing world. For four years she was a biology teacher.

"I think my father wanted me to have a profession," she says. "He wasn't really that keen on horses and I think he was worried that I would pursue a career with them and be sorely disappointed." Unfortunately, both her parents died before they could witness her success. "That makes me very sad," she says. "My mother would have been so proud, and my father would have pretended it was all down to him!"

When Henrietta Knight applied for a trainer's licence in 1989, she was pretty unsure of the future. She had moved out of her family home and rented the farmhouse and stables in which she now lives. It's a beautiful place full of dogs and cats and pictures of hens and endless photographs of her scaling huge jumps on ever huger horses. "I don't ride any more," she says. "I've lost my nerve really and I think it will jinx the horses."

For the first couple of years she survived on the goodwill of friends and owners. "But after that my father died, my yard was hit with a virus and owners started taking their horses away. It was a terrible time," she says. At this point, at her lowest ebb, she bumped into the larger-than-life Terry Biddlecombe. He had once been a formidable jockey, having won the Gold Cup many years before.

"I'd always admired him as a horseman," says Knight. "I would go to the races and stand at the last jump to watch him." They had met eight years previously when the then-retired Biddlecombe came down to her livery yard with a TV crew to do a piece on the Knight way of training horses. "I was so nervous that I put on a thin, frilly blue dress and high heels and twirled around a lot and he thought I was a bit of a silly girl."

It's hard to imagine this practical woman in a frilly dress but despite her 50-plus years, there is something girlish about her. It's as if she's never experienced much of the outside world. Everything is horses and her home. Maybe this was why, by the time she met Biddlecombe again, she was drinking heavily. "I was in a bit of a pickle," she says. "And I wasn't used to sharing my worries with people, so I drank as it seemed the only way out."

On the surface, Biddlecombe must have looked an unlikely candidate for a knight in shining armour. He's a big, broad, charismatic countryman who swears all the time. He had been married twice before and had five children. When he stopped riding he, too, had hit the bottle and moved to Australia in search of a better life. Instead he simply drank even more until he returned and, through the help of friends and the Injured Jockeys' Club, dried out.

Knight says that meeting Biddlecombe probably saved her. "Before Terry moved in, I would sit down on my own and open bottles of wine. Sometimes I topped off the wine with a bottle of champagne. I wasn't an alcoholic. I was lonely and working so very hard." Once Biddlecombe saw the extent of her problems he told her: "It's the bottle or me." "I chose him immediately," she says. They married eight years ago.

"We seem an odd couple," says Knight. "People think I'm very upper class and he isn't. But we are very good together. At first I think people began to take me seriously because Terry was on board, and that annoyed me, but now I feel I am a good trainer in my own right."

No one could possibly deny how popular the couple are. The abiding image from this year's Cheltenham was Knight galloping towards the winners' enclosure and into the arms of her huge, round husband. She was almost weeping. His tears were already in full flow.

Next year is going to be even worse, she says. "When I get nervous, I eat. I put on two stone for Cheltenham this year and could barely fit into my lucky racing suit." She's started going to the gym to make sure she doesn't put it on again for the Gold Cup 2004. "I am even more terrified now. I think Terry is too. He is calmer than me and more optimistic and yet he's very emotional."

Yet there is something rather steely within Henrietta Knight. She believes, at the very core of her, that she and Terry have got it right. "I know you can't wrap horses up in cotton wool," she says, "but you can damn near try!" As she says that, a stable lass appears leading a horse coveredup, head to toe, in a red outdoorrug. "Here's Matey!" says Knight fondling the champion's ears. Best Mate looks up and, as he is let go in the field, bucks and rears like a lunatic.

"You see," says Knight, "now I'm going to worry that he'll damage himself." As we walk back through the yard, ducks scattering, she turns to me and says: "I think I may give it all up one day. I just can't bear the pressure." And then she disappears upstairs to put on her lucky racing suit.

"Don't listen to her," says Biddlecombe fondly, having just walked in. "She's made of strong stuff is my Hen. She ain't ever going to give up." Then he chuckles, rather indulgently.