Hello I'm Kirsty Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1995,

and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a race horse trainer, the daughter of a tenant farmer in Leicestershire, she was brought up in a happy, healthy and hoarse environment.

She started racing when she was eight and she left school at 15.

Her deep love of horses has brought her spectacular success. She won the Grand National in

1983 with Corbier, and in 84 she trained the winner of the Cheltenham Gold Cup. Since then

she's picked up practically every major prize the sport

has to offer including winning both those big races for a second time. She said to be

fierce, dedicated and emotional, a mother to all her charges, a mother who knows, she

says, before anyone else when one of them isn't quite right.

She is Jenny Pittman.

I'm talking about your four-legged charges of course.

You make them sound like children almost.

Well, I think they are actually. They have mannerisms that you get to know and understand. I think that if a mother

walks into a house and she's got her own children playing on the floor she can see

if there's a problem with one of them. When you walk into a horse's box a horse will acknowledge

you in a certain way and when they don't do that then I think there's something

not quite right here. You make it sound

slightly mystical almost as if they're talking you have a sort of inner

sense. Do you wake up in the middle of the night and think I know what's

wrong with so and so? Oh that is awful because I have this habit of waking up between three and four in the

...