YOU WON’T notice them at first, those suspiciously well-plaited ponies at the Meet, the mothers unfathomably laid back and the bonnie child on board just a bit, well, bonnie. But as things start to unravel in your camp, it will dawn on you that those tearless, warm, gung-ho smalls have at their fingertips the most coveted of things: a sporting nanny (SN). And here is a breed of nanny that really does know best.
Take Pea Wallace’s childhood Mary Poppins, Jo, who on autumn hunting mornings would savvily lay out kit on the Aga for her charges to slide into half awake, before setting off with school uniform and a box of Frosties preloaded in the car. “She definitely played a part in my love for country life, animals and sports,” says Wallace, now in her forties. She recalls the time that having delivered the children to school post-hunting, Jo got a call from her teacher to say that six-year-old Wallace was slumped at her desk (the Ribena had been unknowingly switched for port).
