‘Bugger the bloody plane!’ It was the first time I had heard her use an improper word. Both the word, and the sentiments were, I think, new to her. ‘Yes, bugger the plane. That was the most wonderful morning of my life.’
‘I believe you have fallen in love with Auntie Joyce,’ I said.
She turned to me again, and didn’t speak. Instead, an absolutely colossal grin. Then she asked: ‘Will we make it?’
We hit a bump, and I, in my unbalanced crouch, briefly flew, rescuing my hat with an adroit dab of the foot on touching down again. ‘Even money,’ I said. ‘Better, I’ll take six to four.’
I had never intended to be a safari guide. I was always going to be a racehorse trainer, like my father. I had grown up with racehorses. For twenty years, or since I could walk, I had been, or at least had seen myself as his right-hand man. I had been assistant trainer, mucker-outer, yard-sweeper, groom and work-rider. My father was a widower – I could hardly remember my mother – and he had never remarried. Horses were his life. He was English, but ‘by an Irish sire out of an English dam’, as he always put it. English enough in normal circumstances, he would become progressively more Irish with strong emotion or strong drink. Neither state was unusual; his stage Irishisms were deliberately self-mocking, deliberately endearing: ‘Sweet Jaysis, the focken dry season’s upon us,’ every time a bottle was finished, which was often.
He ran a string of a couple of dozen beasts, a mixed band of jumpers and flat horses. There was never a horse of any great distinction, but he, we, had a winner here and a winner there, ‘and God send nothing worse’. He loved horses, gambling, drink and chasing women, the women making a distant, hard-panting fourth. A big, bonhomous, bibulous man, he was greatly and widely loved, if seldom very profoundly. People tended to feel protective of him; I did myself. He was the most easy-going man in the world: generous and comfortable with clients, employees, women, horses. Perhaps that was why his horses never won quite as often as they might have done: he was a man without ruthlessness. But boundlessly optimistic: and as long as the horses won sometimes he was content.
Legends accumulated around him: he was that sort of man. They centred on his eccentricity and his extraordinary ability with horses. The best of these was the Derby winner he found wandering about on a motorway late at night, having dumped its rider and taken off that morning: how my father, having persuaded the frightened animal to trust him, led it home across country, arriving in the horse’s yard at two in the morning in full evening dress, leading a million pounds’ worth of horse in one hand, an open bottle of champagne in the other, a smouldering cigar in his mouth. In fact, it was not a Derby winner, nor a motorway, and the champagne and cigar were later embellishments. But the story was true, the racehorse was indeed a good one (Falco Spirit, went on to win the Cambridgeshire) and my father was certainly wearing a dinner suit. I know, I was there. I had picked him up after a dinner with one of his owners in Newmarket, and was driving him home. I remember seeing the horse and stopping: and then my father’s calm, matter-of-fact gentleness: ‘All right, me fella, what do you say to a few mints, now?’ Inevitably, he had a packet of Polos in his pocket: you could always tell my father’s movements around the yard by following the minty breath of his horses. Everyone in racing loved the story: well, everyone in racing loved my father. But they never sent him their best horses.
I spent most of my youth being told what a wonderful man he was: he was a genius with horses, a genius with money. How did he manage to run a small business so successfully, and with such style? What was his secret? I didn’t know then, but his secret was that he wasn’t and didn’t. It was something I should have known: and perhaps remedied. But I didn’t.
I finally learned the truth of my father’s business a few days after he died of a heart attack at the races. I took a little comfort in the inevitable witticism that ran through racing at the time: he had dropped dead from the sheer shock of seeing one of his own horses win. This was meant affectionately, on the whole, and I took comfort where I could find it. For I was struck down with grief, which is a kind of madness: a refusal to believe that it was not possible to turn the clock back just a few days: to, say, take over the bookwork, run the business, save the day, romp home a winner. Had I done the bookwork, would he be alive now? I could not bear such a thought, but I kept on thinking it all the same.
To my eternal regret, I was not with him at the races that day. I had been in the middle of my finals at university. I was completing a degree in zoology. My childhood, not lonely but somewhat isolated, had been divided between horses and nature. I had been a bird-watcher, a flower-presser, and a maker of soon dead pets from wild rabbits, hedgehogs and baby birds. I had jars full of beetles and I had watched many moths emerge raggedly from hoarded chrysalises. The first great love of my life was a stoat I had as a pet for a glorious few months, until it escaped. I was an only child in a stableyard set a fair distance from the village: horses, birds and wild beasts peopled my childhood: these, and my affectionate, chaotic father.
I read, of course, incessantly. My early heroes were Mowgli and Dr Dolittle; later heroes were the great interpreters of animal behaviour: Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, Cynthia Moss on elephants, George Schaller on pandas and gorillas, George Sorensen and Peter Norrie on lion. My copy of their book, Lions of the Plains, was nightly perused in wonder, till it became a mass of dog-ears and pencillings. I had a few friends from neighbouring yards; my second great love after the stoat was the daughter of a trainer, a kind and lovely girl of much horsiness: very much my type. Perhaps I would have married her, had I not wanted to go to university.
My father had not exactly approved of my ambition to go to university, but he tolerated it well enough. Tolerating things was his strong point. ‘Horses have got four legs, and if you can count to four, you’ve got enough focken zoology for me,’ he had said, but only because he felt it was expected of him. Besides, I was never a student in the traditional sense of the term, having hundreds of affairs, exploring the far reaches of the universe, plotting global revolution. There was a girl in my second year, but she went off to study epiphytes in the Amazonian rain forest. She was, in a different way, very much my type. Things might have turned out otherwise, but probably not. I was still very much involved with racing and horses. I just did my course work and left for the yard. I would arrive at my provincial university at around noon on Mondays, still smelling of horses after riding out two lots. I would stay in residence until Friday lunch time, and get back to the yard in time for evening stables. I knew very few people outside my tutorial group. University was not a formative experience, it was a sideshow. My real life was bound up with horses: with my father’s horses, our horses. I had never considered the possibility of life without him, or them. And so, at his death, I found myself in free fall, plummeting under the gravity of grief.
My first coherent thought about the future, after I had been summoned from the exams by bad news, was that I would simply take over the running of the yard rather sooner than I had expected. Surely, I thought, it was just a matter of picking up the bookwork; I knew the horse side of things backwards. Without ever thinking the matter out at all clearly, I had envisaged taking an increasingly dominant role at the yard, my father gracefully assuming a back seat. It would be a painless transition, a gradual shift in the emphasis of a partnership that had already worked well for twenty years and more. But like lappet-faced vultures, troubles came down to roost.
I had never bothered much with the business side of stable management. Nor, I soon learned, had my father. There were debts: debts to inspire horror and despair. The yard was so heavily mortgaged it was effectively valueless. Repossession was inevitable. The six horses he – we – I – actually owned had not in fact been paid for. They had to go back. We owed the feed merchant, the farrier, the vet, we owed Weatherbys, we owed several jockeys. We even owed for a couple of horses that we no longer possessed.
