It's a new chapter for queen of Aintree Jenny Pitman

Even deep into retirement, almost 10 years since she walked away from training, Jenny Pitman still has the capacity to surprise.

Talking in the summer house of her idyllic thatched home near Newbury, the most famous female trainer ever, turned fiction writer, drags another memory from the overflowing deposits of her colourful, successful and occasionally controversial career.

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Jenny Pitman

Almost business as usual: Pitman in cms now

'Somebody said to me a few months ago: "In one of your books, you write quite specifically about a phone-tapping incident. Did you have to do research?"'

Pitman recalls. Not much, she'd been there and got the T-shirt in the aftermath of the abandoned bomb scare Grand National in 1997 when she emotionally denounced the perpetrators live on television.

'Special Branch were involved. I used to have to check my car for several weeks afterwards because of the threats that were made after what I said to Des Lynam on the television on the way out. Nobody knows that.

'Everybody thought it was animal rights and then when it turned out to be IRA, there was phone calls and all the rest of it.

'You can't believe what it was like for us. These threats being made. Our calls were monitored and they were very worried.'

When Pitman left behind intimate contact with racing in 1999, wearied by her successful battle with cancer, love her or loathe her, a little bit of colour went out of the sport, too.

The woman dubbed 'The Cuddly One' by TV pundit John McCririck, could also savage the ear off an hapless victim down a 200-mile telephone line with the flint-edged drive of someone who had built her racing castle from rubble.

Retirement may have softened the edges but not blurred the forthright opinions of a trainer who won two Cheltenham Gold Cups and two Grand Nationals.

High on the list is concern that a sport, obsessed with punter correctness, might be getting its priorities wrong.

'It appears to me, looking through the window, that racing appears less considerate towards the animal than it is to punters. When you get a situation when a horse is being off for 12 months or longer and a jockey and trainer are questioned for them not being hard enough on it, I think what is the matter with you?

'It's known the horse has been injured. If a top-class footballer has been off injured, does the manager stick him on for 90 minutes? No.

'I used to bring horses back from injury and say to the jockeys: "Just run the best race you can but don't knock them about". If you get them to stretch too far, you have got a problem.

'That's all it takes to rupture a tendon. Burrough Hill Lad (the 1984 Gold Cup winner) only had one good leg. When he had been off, I would bring him back and he'd run the best race he could. But they don't accept that nowadays and it bothers me. The people who are framing the rules are not stockmen. They have not been at the pointy end.

'The bottom line is it is unacceptable to expect trainers and jockeys to get every last ounce out of a horse every time it runs. If I was still training now I'd spend most of my time in the Tower of London, but only because of the respect I had for my horses.'

Lack of intimate contact with her galloping friends has been the hardest part of leaving behind racing. But that is being slightly remedied. With son Mark, the former jockey and trainer, Jenny has formed a racing club. The new outlet has reawakened the senses that have lain almost dormant for a decade.

She said: 'We went up to Paul Cole's and I hadn't been on the gallops for such a long time. I smelt things that had such a loveliness about them. It warmed the cockles of my heart. When the horses were coming up the gallops, with the larks singing, it was just bloody magic.'

That feeling was reinforced when the club's Machinist, trained by David Nicholls, was fourth in the Stewards' Cup and Danetime Panther, trained by Cole and ridden by Frankie Dettori, was fourth at Windsor yesterday.

'It someone had said I would enjoy a day Flat racing, I wouldn't have believed them,' says Pitman, betraying her dyed-in-the-wool jumping roots.

Those should be satisfied by Aohna, a filly with Alan King being prepared for bumpers.

'She's a busy filly, the sort to do a day's work by lunchtime,' adds Pitman. 'She reminds me of Alekhine, a gelding who won five hurdles for me.'

For Pitman, dipping her toe back in the action has rekindled that trademark passion.

It's a new chapter for queen of Aintree Jenny Pitman