Daily Mail, Monday, August 12, 2019 Page 29Pictures: RICHARD WALKER; MIKE THOMAS/CATERS-SHOWSthe time you went on honeymoon,
but didn’t have the wedding,’ says
her friend Anne as we sit in Katy’s
kitchen and she wonders if she
should open the gin.
‘I don’t think we should go into
that,’ Katy says.
husband number one was Amos.
he’d been a student at her father’s
school and it was a union ‘everyone
thought was suitable’.
Katy was 19, a virgin, excited
about the prospect of this thing
called sex she knew very little
about. ‘I learned fast. What a
disappointment. I only discoveredlater that it could be quite nice.
When I did learn that I was like a
child in a sweet shop.’
Amos had been given a farm by
his parents, and she could have
been set up for life. But after two
years, bored and frustrated, she
walked out, taking the dog theyhad acquired. ‘I swapped the
husband for the dog,’ she says
breezily. ‘The solicitor said I could
get half the farm, but I’ve never
taken a bean from any of my
husbands. All I took was the dogs.’
Next came the only husband she
remains on good terms with — and
whose surname she has kept.
Jim Cropper was — and still is — a
leading light in the sheepdog world.
It was through him that she got
involved in competing.
This wedding sounds a bit more
‘her’. Under her wedding dress she
wore wellingtons. Afterwards, the
couple went to the pub.
In her kitchen, there is a photo-
graph of her with Jim, and a
collection of dogs. Whether it’s on
display because she has fond
memories of the husband or the
dogs is unclear, but that marriage
didn’t work either.
Marriage number three was to
Albert, a huntsman. This one
sounds like a riot.
‘We got married during the hunt,’
she says. ‘But I managed to fall off
the horse as it was standing still. I
didn’t have a dress for that one. I
wore canary yellow jodhpurs, but
they were so tight I didn’t wear
knickers because they would have
shown. The trouble was, when I fell
in the hedge, the jodhpurs split all
the way up the back.’
She can’t recall how long she was
married to Albert. ‘A couple of years
was always my limit.’ And you were
always the one to leave? ‘Yes.
What’s the point in staying if you
know they aren’t who you thought
they were?’
Could we conclude that she per-
haps just never was wife material?
‘But I could have been a good wife,
if I’d had a good husband.’ She says
one of her best qualities is loyalty.
Were you loyal in each marriage?
She laughs. ‘Well I was. I wanted to
be. Until they p***ed me off.’
Quite a lot happened between
husbands three and four. A brief
liaison with a married man sent her
life hurtling in an unexpected
direction. At 41, she was distraughtto discover she was pregnant. ‘I’d
never wanted children. I didn’t have
a maternal bone in my body. I did
12 pregnancy tests and said they all
must be wrong. When the doctor
confirmed it, I told him: “I can’t
have a baby. I just can’t.” ’
She wouldn’t countenance a
termination. ‘Religion, I guess.’ And
after a fraught delivery — ‘I punched
the doctor,’ she admits — daughter
henrietta was born.
Sixteen years on, Katy still sounds
shocked that she embraced
motherhood with gusto. If there is
one person she loves more than her
dogs it is henrietta, who seems
infinitely more down-to-earth than
her mother.
‘Oh, she’s the sensible one,’ says
Katy. ‘We are Ab Fab. She’s more
academic. She’s the clever one. She
wants to study medicine.’F
OR heNRIeTTA’S sake,
Katy tried to create a
family life. There was a
‘wonderful handsome’
man called Michael, but tragically
he had cancer and passed away.
Then there was another Michael,
‘who seemed adorable, at first, but
then they all do’. She married him
in Kenya. She rolls her eyes. ‘I know.
And I did try to make that work,
because henrietta adored him.’
So what was wrong with him. ‘he
was a t**t,’ she says.
The baffling thing is why Katy
thinks she needs a man. She should
be a poster girl for self-sufficiency,
though she admits to being wistful
about the idea of sex. ‘I tell you
what I’d love. A real man, with
strong hands and strong wrists.’
For now, though, there’s a new
addition to the household, her
latest puppy, nine-week-old gin.
And soon gin will hopefully have
a brother or sister ‘who will be
called Double’.
Katy lifts the little bundle into
her arms, and they share a moment.
‘Isn’t it the best sort of love?’
she asks.Trials of life: Katy
Cropper with her
dogs Butch (left)
and Abi. Right:
Shepherding in
2002 with baby
Henrietta and
(below) with
second husband
Jim CropperPage 29hadacquired ‘Iswapped the todiscovershewaspregnant ‘I’d