Sunday Telegraph from London, Greater London, England • 38

I 2 REVIEW arts.telegraph.co.uk The Sunday Telegraph AUGUST 28 2005 FEATURES Why our guinea pig is looking glum And another thing. SANDI TOKSVIG here was a curious theme in the news this week as we discovered that testing kids in this country has allegedly become easier, while testing animals is now almost impossible. GCSE results were out on Thursday and I the early hours of the morning eating spent PHOTOGRAPH: PAL HANSEN 'It's as if I was visited by some sort of vision. The horse just kept coming back at me' Telegraph Books Direct The latest puzzles to challenge you Griddlers and Sudoku Griddlers are infuriating, compulsive and entertaining. Chit Suntan Discover the hidden picture grid by SEVENTH BOOK OF filling in some squares as solids and the remainder GRIDDLERS with Attached dots.

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Visit our website www.telegraphbooksdirect.co.uk cardigan with anxiety as we awaited my oldest daughter's grades. I spent much of this past spring treating her like a goose on a farm as I force-fed facts into her. Indeed, I spent so long at it that I went from knowing nothing whatsoever about chemistry to finding myself bringing the periodic table as possible dinner party conversation. On reflection, thought 16-year-old studying seemed tougher than I remembered. I mean, even the title of the exam has four letters compared with the one in my day.

My lovely girl did well, only to be told by educational know-alls that it has all become easier anyway. doesn't care and has embarked round of heady celebrations. The joy is only marginally marred by the despondency of our guinea pig, who finds his farm holiday has been cancelled and he is not to be tested at all. Fireworks in the gender war two university professors (both male) claim to have tested 80,000 people (male and female) and discovered that men are more intelligent than women. One of them, Professor Lynn, claimed that this was because men had bigger brains.

He failed to mention that men also wear bigger shoes, which must explain why they so often put their foot in things. One litmus test of boy brain power might be to look at the academic results of the current crop of world leaders. The White House website proudly states that George W. Bush graduated Yale University in the "top 85 per cent of his class." The top cent? Am I missing something or does mean that he was 15 per cent away from the bottom? Tony Blair, of course, got a second from Oxford and a third at the Bar, and it is difficult to know which organisation was nearer the correct mark in their assessment. Still, be fair, he is sorting out terrorism in farflung places.

Now all he has to do is have a little look at letting it happen round agricultural establishments in Staffordshire. On the subject of great minds, the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Albert (not an easy name for an autograph) once submitted his findings of a new sugar molecule to a noted scientific journal. As the mother of a child with a chemistry GCSE, even I know that all felt ignorantabout the actual structure of his discovery and wanted to call it "ignose." The editors of the sober publication thought this was frivolous and asked for another suggestion, to which the eminent scientist submitted In the end he was quite right about his own ignorance. It turned out he had found Vitamin and not sugar after all. Could happen to anybody.

For some, the great test of the week has related to the thwack of leather on willow at Trent Bridge. Cricket is the game that separates the native Brit from the late interloper onto the pitch such as myself. As I understand it (and frankly I don't), teams, dressed in identical colours, battle it out for several days over a small pot of ashes and it is hugely exciting. To the baffled outsider Ashes competition has all the hallmarks of some kind of quaint post-cremation entertainment in which rival family members vie for the remains of a particularly loved one. Personally, I think if you want to make a display of saying goodbye you can't do better than the firework option.

At a cost of about £1,500 vou can now have the dust of a dearly departed incorporated into a specially modified rocket and send them off with a bang. The top-of-the-range option is apparently a spectacular show of rockets. star shells, aerial mines and Roman candles. I don't know what the bargain basement deal is perhaps a sparkler and a quick whizz round a Catherine wheel. The horse was my baby Behind Lizzie Spender's quest for her dream horse lies a still deeper longing.

She tells Louise Carpenter about the child she and Barry Humphries never had is lunchtime at The Connaught and Lizzie Spender is studying the menu, oblivious to the suited businessmen on the next table trying not to stare at her. At 55. she is her own personal advertisement: fabulously tall, immaculately blonded with perfect teeth, and projecting a kind of glamour that bears the legacy of doing the wrong things with the right people in the late 1960s. Her husband, Barry Humphries, the creative genius behind Dame Edna and Les Patterson and a reformed alcoholic still in AA, fell in love with her across a crowded restaurant and likened the experience to intoxication. No wonder.

At close quarters, there is a classiness to Spender beyond those race-horse legs and golden hair. She is wearing, for example, the most exquisite gems. Humphries, to whom she has been married 15 years, is, she says, "exceedingly Since her extraordinary and some might say crazy adventure, Lizzie Spender has experienced a renewed lust for life. Not only has she written Wild Horse Diaries, to be published in Australia and Britain this month, but she also permitted herself to indulge her own whims. The book is about much more than the need to own a horse: its real subject is a woman's yearning for self-fulfilment.

would never have gone out, got Horse and Hound and simply bought a horse and kept it somewhere, although since marrying Barry I could certainly have afforded it." she says firmly. "It took this extraordinary thing to happen to me. It's as if I was visited by some sort of vision. The horse just kept coming back at me. And then it became as about the journey as it was about I thought I was looking for.

and what I was looking for turned out to be something quite different." Lizzie Spender grew up in the shadow of her parents' brilliance. Her father, Sir Stephen Spender, was the last surviving member of the Auden group (he died 10 years ago), and her Russian mother. Natasha Litvin. was an accomplished concert pianist (she is still alive. and lives in St John's Wood).

While most of Wild Horse Diaries is based on the journal entries Spender kept during her outback odyssey. the flashback to her childhood poignantly illuminates her isolation and loneliness, as well as the privilege of growing up close to fame. She admits that it was only when she met Anjelica Huston daughter of the film direc- tor John Huston and his dancer wife. Ricky that she felt she had found somebody on her own "child children of interesting, even brilliant. parents who were so tied up in the drama of their lives or with the exi- ise that how you "instantly become" is that you go off and work for 10 vears in obscurity." To her credit.

Spender did work away in obscurity. As a young woman she worked for Richard Branson. then she studied for three years at the London Drama Centre. When that did not go to plan. she wrote two screenplays.

one successful and one not. and became a food writer. But at the age of 40. after becoming the fourth Mrs Humphries. she found herself once again in the position of playing second fiddle to creative genius.

It would spoil the story to reveal whether or not Spender ever caught that horse she saw from the helicopter the third of the three she had been promised in her life. Anyway, she says. smiling. the horse became "beside the 'For those of us who don't have children maybe we can treat ourselves to animals' gencies of their work, that they were often absent in body, and, even when present, were often preoccupied in mind and Does she resent her parents' selfabsorption now? "Not in the slightest." she says. "I remember when I wanted to actress.

I was sent to Peggy Ashcroft to do my audition speeches. and my father rang Laurence Olivier to find out the name of the best drama school. It felt like I was on a cloud sailing through all these mountain tops around me. and that I couldn't quite work out how to jump from the cloud to the mountain top. What it took me a long time to learn is that you have to get off the cloud, go to the bottom of the mountain and put one foot in front of the other, not even think about climbing it, just put one foot in front of the other until you reach a reasonable height.

It took me a long time to real- Her brumby adventure. taken one step at a time. was part of the trek up her metaphorical mountain. But there was another. deeper.

emo tional drive. After seven years of trying to conceive with Humphries. Spender was forced. at the age of 47. to accept failure.

one point in the book. she shares an epiphany she had during a trip to Poland. In a church she sees the sun onto the face of a slanting, girl. Why had I not seven given a soul to look after?" she writes. At that moment she accepts that her infertility is not God telling her she would have been a bad mother: "My next sense was that the real question was.

what would I be given to take its place? Maybe the experience of searching for. finding and keeping my wild horse would he my gift. Some of the most rending sections of Wild Horse Diaries compare It was a classy chestnut, aflame with some kind of rare spirit From previous page one of the wild horses, the brumbies, which inhabit the outback regions across Australia. Since I was a small child, I'd had a fantasy that I would one day be shown a herd of horses and that someone would say to me: "Take your pick, whichever one you like, it's yours." I fell in love at first sight. There was something about this horse, the way it moved, floated, that took my breath away.

I pushed switch to the intercom, pointed and yelled above the roar of the helicopter engine, "That one there, the chestnut, that's the one I It was fantasy, I knew it was fantasy but I couldn't stop myself. We were flying over an outback station called Athenrai, a property owned by a couple called Celia and Michael and run by my friend Susan Bradley. As a feral horse a descendant of horses on the property that had once been domesticated my brumby belonged to Celia. Later that evening, when the helicopter had landed, she came up to me: "That horse you saw," she said quietly. "The one you liked.

It's yours." Horse mad Lizzie Spender hitches a ride on a mule in Death Valley, I was 53 and fate had thrown down a I gauntlet. It was time to do crazy things That evening we had a party, a barbecue under the poinciana trees. I noticed that people were looking at me in a strange way. They'd heard about the gift. I tossed the fish I'd caught onto the heavy stone barbecue, as I mulled over the situation.

Even if, by some God-given miracle, I managed to find this horse again, the rituals of acquiring horsey kit with those that surround the arrival of a new child. Cleaning tack. for example. is likened to "the little clothes for the baby that will never be born. and I have a fen of those tiny garments.

Writing about it brought her no pain. though: "I think you reach an age where you might as well throw what you've learned out there." Her infertility is a direct result of the bald fact that she left it too late: "I always assumed I would have a child: we all did. I have a lot of friends my age who tell into the 1970s trap of juggling careers. We still had our mothers way of living. This current generation are a million times better at juggling the careers and the children and telling the husbands to change the nappies." Does she regret it now? She sighs.

I can't think of anvone I would have had a child with. Anjelica Huston said to me when we were both about 35. "You do realise that anyone who has a child now has to be prepared to bring the child up on their own." and that had never occurred to me. I thought you had to find the person you wanted to spend the rest of your life with and vou were going to have children only with that person. I think for those of us who don't have children.

it's great to have step-children and god children. but maybe we can treat ourselves to animals. be it a dog or a cat "Or a horse." add. "I am totally besotted with horses." she agrees. "The relationship with animals is somewhere to give your maternal love." She would.

she says. like to gather a little stationing it just outside Sydney. Her friend in Australia has been sending her pictures and apparently there are some lovely horses a bit further east. There's also her new friendship with Monty Roberts. the original horse whisperer.

Are you fulfilled now? I ask. "Let's just say it's work in progress. she laughs. PHOTOGRAPHS: STEPHEN SPENDER: MARIA TOMLINS 1959. Right: wild horses corralled in the Australian outback running wild in the limitless bush stretching across millions of acres, then what? I would have to work out a way to catch it without endangering its life.

And catching it would be only the first step in a very long and difficult journey. How on earth could you even begin to break in a wild horse, an animal of enormous power, strong enough to maim or kill a person? Why would a wild horse want to submit to human dominance? Would it be cruel to take a horse out of an apparently idyllic existence in the bush? I had hardly ridden, let alone schooled a horse, for more than a quarter of a century. I'd never gentled, or broken in, a horse from scratch, let alone one that had never been handled, never even seen a person. And supposing we managed to catch it, I'd need to transport it somewhere. Where? We have a flat in London, although we are rarely there, and a pied terre in Sydney; neither has a garden, let alone somewhere to keep a horse.

Our lifestyle makes a staying in one place a rarity. So they could stop looking at me as if I were some eccentric about to pursue the impossible dream, because the sad truth I thought was that I am a very sensible person, prone to weighing up obstacles and sane considerations, and allowing them to take their rightful precedence over mad follies. Months passed. I returned to Sydney and then to London. It is hard to pinpoint exactly when I made the decision.

in April the following year, I visited a friend who was fighting cancer. She started me thinking about regret. You mostly regret what you haven't done, or when you haven't tried hard enough, not the things you have done. I and fate had thrown me down a gauntlet. If I could act as if I were the sort of person who did crazy brave things, then maybe I could become that sort of person.

I set to work and cleared my diary for June 2004, the beginning of the dry season in Kimberley. Barry seemed reconciled to my abandoning him and to getting on with his work commitments alone. I'm not sure I gave him much choice. For most of our 15 years together I have been an attentive wife, cooking nice meals and heading the support team. I am one of nature's caretakers.

Putting a positive spin on that, I feel good if I make others feel goodia Less positive, a friend once me, "Why do you always focus on the success of others? What about you, what do you want?" So now it was about me "wanting" and doing something for myself, and others needing to fit in with that. I didn't ask, I announced I was going, and Barry was totally supportive every inch of the way. I had only the vaguest idea of what the costs would be. Indeed I had only the vaguest idea of how we would set about catching this horse. Maybe we would have a round-up, or find one of those famous horse whisperers.

Surely it would not cost more than about £2,000 or £3,000 and for that, there was my Auntie Christine. My father's younger sister had passed away a couple of years previously at the age of 92, and had generously left me £7,000. What better way to celebrate her memory than to spend it on an adventure? 'Wild Horse Diaries' by Lizzie Spender (John Murray) is available for £18 from Telegraph Books Direct, 0870 155 7222.