My Amazing Family Of Performers
Take It Easy, 04 September 2005

Kuchina Johnson, 38, and family are born performers - and so are their six horses, nine dogs and five cats...

As the flamenco music reached its crescendo and the horse took a bow, the crowd roared, in the saddle sat my daughter, Kuchina Junior, then just three years old.

"Well done!' I clapped.

When my husband Sam, 39, who runs his own skip hire business, and I had our children Frank, now 18, Kuchina Junior, 11, and Phoebe, 7, we raised them to train horses, just as I had been. Aged three, they each started riding and performing for the public soon afterwards. My dad, Brassy Searle, 77, and mum Phoebe, 73, had brought me and my nine brothers and sisters up around Dad's business as a horse and dog trainer.

I was 12 when I got my first horse, Gringo. He threw me off a few times - broke my leg once and another time rendered me unconscious. Eventually I trained him and was hooked. With eight horses and three trained dogs, Dad and I put on displays for country shows and farm festivals and lent animals to TV companies. Two of our horses starred as Black Beauty in the 1970s TV series, and I played a sheikh galloping across the desert on our white horse in a Tia Maria advert in 1994.

'Will you take over the business?' Dad asked in 2000, ready to take a backseat. So I created the website and updated our famous Kuchina's Spanish Dancing Horses routine where, dressed in Spanish costumes, Dad and I got the horses to perform moves like walking sideways and trotting on the spot.

Dad's still heavily involved and though Frank does the skips with his dad, he occasionally gets roped in - he loves stunt riding. I'm the first to admit we're an unusual family. Instead of buying Dad slippers for his birthday, I bought him a stallion called Mucho Dinero. I'll sometimes do the school run in a in our house, 10-ton horsebox, and people in our village of Oakhanger, Hampshire, have nicknamed us the Dream Team.

A few months ago I found Kuchina Junior and Phoebe on the floor with one of our five cats.

"We're training her to play dead," they giggled.

In our house, if it has four legs and a fur coat, we'll train it! We've got six horses now, two expecting foals, and a new litter of puppies means we now have nine dogs. It might be eccentric and real back-breaking work at times and we'll never make a million out of it, but we're comfortable and I can't imagine doing anything else."