Making Allowances

Chapter 11

Early in the New Year, I finally got my chance to travel to one of Vendredi’s races as one of the “connections”.  Grampy was not well, and a couple of the Uncles had other commitments. Dad and I went with Uncle Ray, who had nursed dad’s horse and bred Vendredi from her, and the youngest Uncle, Paul. 

We took Uncle Paul’s old Ford Granada on the tricky, cross-country trek to Towcester, a pleasantly situated, undulating circuit in rural Northamptonshire. The journey to Towcester from Gloucestershire is tortuous, because there are basically no fast roads for the entire 90 or so miles. It took the best part of three hours for us to get there.

This was to be Vendredi’s last run before the Final of the Novice Hurdle competition that she had qualified for in the Autumn. Dennis was keen to see how she would fare on a testing right hand track, in readiness for the Final which was due to be run at Ascot several weeks later.

About ten minutes before Vendredi’s race, the penultimate race on the card, we made our way to the parade ring. It was by no means a busy meeting, there was plenty of space around the paddock. Nevertheless, I still felt rather self-important as I strode into the circle, swelling with pride as I watched the same horse I had watched being born in a stable, now being paraded before the punters as the ante-post favourite. We had seen the early shows of betting; clearly, we were not the only people impressed by her victory at Chepstow. Generally she was 11-4 favourite, although I was to see her at as low a price as 7-2 before the race began.

My mood altered a little as I looked around me. Other groups of owners and syndicates had assembled. There seemed to be two types, two castes. Firstly, there was the Old School; Burberrys, Barbours, Tweeds, Furs, Picnic Baskets, Range Rovers, Shooting Sticks, Weathered Faces. These were the “dyed in the wool” race horse owners. Then there was the New Breed, businessmen with mobile phones, fedora hats, silk ties and tanned wives; self-made, self assured and self satisfied. Thank God for the Syndicates, I thought.

I looked down at my tired looking brogues, felt the hole in the pocket of my old greatcoat, studied the sellotape repair to my binoculars. I looked at Uncle Ray, with his knitted yellow waistcoat worn under his grey suit, Uncle Paul with his old leather car coat and flat cap,  and Dad, with the tab of his jodhpur boots sticking out above his ankles, causing his cord trousers to ride up above them. I smiled inwardly, almost breaking into a laugh as I thought of the old Granada, rusting away in the car park. We looked like the Clampitts going horseracing, it could not be denied. I wondered about how much all these people assembled were worth, what chance did any of us ever think we really had in the face of all this.

Dennis had now arrived and was talking to Dad, Ray and Paul. The bell rang and out came Ryan Kellett, smiling broadly, missing several teeth, scuttling along like a mouse. They began to talk about tactics for the race. With nothing I could contribute to the conversation, I began to look around again. Dennis must have sensed this and shuffled over to me.

“I reckon your old man is going to try and see if he can jock’ Ryan off!” he chuckled.

“Nothing would surprise me.” I commented.

“Are you all right lad?” asked Dennis, “Enjoying the limelight?”

“Actually,” I confided, “ I was just thinking to myself how out of place we looked.”

“Come again?”

“Well, I mean, look at all these people. None of ‘em are short of a bob, are they?”

“Now hang about,” said Dennis with a stern raise of his finger. “You have every right to be here as much as these people. Don’t you forget that. Lots of these folk are only here because they have been lucky enough to have had the good fortune to be born into money or been lucky in business. This is an indulgence to these people. To you folk, it’s your lives, a labour of love. You bred that bloody horse, some o’ these folk just wrote out a cheque. I’ll you this for no’wt. That win at Chepstow for your family, and what little prize money it earned them, gave me more satisfaction than winning the Champion Hurdle. Do you know why?”

I shook my head.

“I’ll tell you. Because I remember your Dad as a young lad, comin’ to Gaffer’s with no change of clothes, hungry and cold, soaking wet out on Cleeve Hill, labouring away cleaning tack in the small hours. If any man ever deserved some success from this blessed game, it’s him. I’m only sorry it didn’t come to him as a jockey.”

Dennis patted me on the back.

“No lad,” he whispered, “you’ve as much right as any of these people to be here.

They all have to eat, sleep and shit, just like you and me.”

He went to walk away but turned around and murmured “ Remember, we’re saddling up the bloody favourite!” and with a wink, he was gone.

We had a good view of the race from the Grandstand. For once we could see virtually all the course, save for a hundred or so yards in the far left-hand corner of the track. They started way out in the country, breaking evenly, the entire field of ten bunched together, remaining this way for the first three flights. Vendredi was travelling well, moving with her usual graceful economy.

As they levelled up for the home straight on the first circuit, Kellett tucked Vendredi into third spot, still flowing freely, on a tight rein.

I nudged Dad, “She’s going like a dream!”

Me and my big mouth.

On the first flight on the next circuit, the first four took the flight in close proximity, but having landed, Vendredi suddenly appeared to grind to a complete halt and the rest of the field streamed past. Kellett leapt off straight away. I felt a burning sensation deep in my throat, like a child who wanted to cry after having been scolded, but no words or even sound came.

“Shit!” cursed Dad, “She must be lame. Come on!”

We slipped down to the front of the stand and back towards the gate on the course which led back to the unsaddling area. A short while passed, and then Kellett appeared, looking as if someone had died; his face was ashen grey, his demeanour forlorn, his gait slumped.

Dennis appeared at speed, What is it Ryan?” he asked with a quiet concern.

“The flight caught her. Look.”

Ryan Kellett pointed to her rear left leg. Now we could see it, a massive open wound running about thirty inches down the leg. It had been caused by the hurdle flight springing backwards and a twig or similar constituent part of the obstacle, catching in the horse’s flesh, causing a tearing of the flesh, a freak injury.

I could tell from Dad, Dennis and Ray’s body language that this was very serious. This was confirmed then by the course vet, who announced that he had not seen one as bad as this in the twenty two years he had worked on the course. We then had to go through the heart-breaking ordeal of holding and muzzling the poor horse as the vet administered over forty stitches, as it would not have been possible to anaesthetise the animal safely. Even with the stitches completed, the vet remarked that there could be no guarantees against possible infection; we did not need him to reiterate what the consequences of infection might be in a case like this. By now, it was patently obvious that, even if Vendredi were to survive, as far as her racing career was concerned, this was the end of the line.

Stuart Mimms and Dennis took Vendredi away, whilst the “connections” sat in the vet’s office in. Uncle Ray gazed silently into the direction of the horse-boxes, shaking his head intermittently. Uncle Paul cursed and chain-smoked, pausing occasionally to clear his reddening eyes. I sat very quietly, listening to the distant gurgle of laughter, muted cheers, loud brash voices from the course; once again, the Racing Game had kicked us in the teeth.

Dad just stared into space and said absolutely nothing.

Finally, it was time to go. Uncle Ray, hard as nails, tried to put a brave face on what surely was a dark hour for him.

“Come on boys,” he whispered, trying to force a smile, “let’s go and have a pint.”

“Might as well”, said Paul.

And so they had several, whilst I observed and did the driving.

“I’ll get her better,” announced Uncle Ray as we drove home, “ and I might sent her to stud.”

“We might as well pay Dennis up and have her home,” agreed Dad.

Uncle Paul nodded in resignation, “Good while it lasted,” he remarked, desperately looking for something positive to say in the circumstances, “I’m sure she would have gone on to win more races.”

“Yeah, too right,” said Dad, “only wish that I’d had a chance to ride something as good as she was.”

Uncle Ray turned to me. “Too much heartbreak in this game,” he sighed.

“That”, said Dad, after we had dropped the others off, “is it.”

“What?” I asked.

“I’ve had it with this game,” he declared, “It clearly isn’t meant to be.”

“We’ve had more than our fair share of bad luck.” I agreed.

“More than our fair share?” asked Dad with an air of incredulity, “You can say that again. The only luck we’ve ever had has been bad.”

I remembered the conversations that we had when I had been struggling at school.

“We’re not quitters Dad,” I encouraged him, “we’ll come back somehow. You might get a decent ride. We might breed another horse. I might win the pools and buy us a Champion.”

Dad clasped my hand over the gearstick.

“Champ,” he began, “there are certain times in everyone’s lives when they have to confront what is real. The boxer who becomes prone to old cuts re-opening, the racing driver whose reactions start to slow up and cause mistakes, the office manager who can’t keep abreast of new technology, the builder with arthritic hands. A bit like us really, playing the Sport of Kings on a beer and fags budget. The time comes, like today, when you take one arse-kicking too many. It’s then that you know it’s time to call it a day. I love this sport, but the truth is I am pissed off with getting my arse kicked.

“Sooner or later, one of us is going to end up dead or bankrupt, or have a heart attack through all the stress. Let those who can afford to indulge, carry on. There are lots of other things we can do with what’s left of our lives. That’s it, for me. I don’t want any part of it any more.”

I was stunned to hear this; it sounded like surrender, there was clearly no way back.

Try as I might to lift his spirits, Dad did not respond. Over the next few days, I watched his behaviour. He spent the entire next weekend at the Golf Course; a number of Golf magazines appeared around the house. Even a lovely old print that had hung in the front room as long as I could remember, of a steeplechase, was replaced by a cricketing scene. Mum reported that he had put all his point to point memorabilia, race programmes, cutting and so on, into the little grey suitcase  and thrown it into the bottom of his wardrobe. It was if he was purging his life of the racing game.

A month or so later, Grampy died. I remarked that his last year or so had been a lot of fun for him, with Vendredi’s adventures, but Dad could not be swayed. He took the line that the disappointment of what happened at Towcester probably did as much harm than any good which had preceded it, which I thought was very harsh.

By now, Vendredi was over the most dangerous period of recovery. Uncle Ray deliberated about sending her to stud and asked Dad for his opinion, but even this could not shake Dad from his new standpoint.

“I’ll happily house them both here,” he told Ray, “but I don’t want to be involved.”

I had wondered what Dad would ever do if, for some reason, he was not involved in the Racing Game. It came as a great shock to me, seeing how very well he appeared to be coping without it. His golf handicap began to cascade down, and he had an surprising start to the new cricket season, notching up two fifties before the end of May.

The following Autumn was no different. He began to take my younger brother Tim to some football matches, and continued to spend a lot of time at the Golf Club, or working on the garden.  The split appeared to be permanent and irrevocable. The dream, it seemed, had finally died.

Chapter 12, Part 1

Synopsis

If you would like to contact Richie, please email him at: richie@baylands.fsnet.co.uk

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