this was disaster. My entire legacy was debt. Solicitors wrote to me in scores, their offices telephoned me hourly. My father’s, our, my solicitor would not let me touch a penny of the estate, such as it was. Practically everyone in racing had a prior claim on it. Including the solicitor himself, as it happened.
Clearing up was, inevitably, a grim business. The owners took their horses away one by one, all with kind words and regrets, none more so than Cynthia, the tearful owner of Darlin’ Girl, who had been a faithful owner and, off and on, a faithful mistress to my intermittently faithful father. The lads were paid off: some grousing, some in tears. I organised a funeral, distractedly: my father had been a sentimental, non-practising Catholic, barring annual drunken forays to midnight mass. The undertaker kept ringing me up to ask unanswerable questions, like how should my father be prepared? What were his favourite hymns? I remembered his drunken improvised hymn of victory one afternoon about a year before, accompanied by a mad jig round the yard with two Tesco bags brimming with tenners. It went something like ‘We’ve stuffed the focken bookie and he’s lost his focken balls’, but perhaps that wouldn’t do. Any bloody hymn. ‘The Lord Is My Shepherd’ is very popular at these occasions, sir. What? Oh yes, the one about the quiet waters by? Yes, sir. Excellent, jolly good. Though neither water nor quiet had ever played a big part in his life. And what should he wear, sir? Plain wooden overcoat, cheapest in the shop. Very good, sir. And what shall I do with his effects? His what? Burn the bloody things. I’m afraid I can’t do that, sir. Will you take delivery of them? All right, all right.
And so I had to sign for this miserable bundle of junk. A large rumpled suit in Prince of Wales check, mud round the turn-ups and a red wine stain over the breast pocket. Brown brogues that needed mending. In the suit pockets keys, Polos. A wallet containing the usual odds and ends. A pair of unusually good race-glasses. A brown racing trilby. My legacy. The rest of the estate was being fought over by my father’s creditors and their solicitors: carrion feeders, hyenas and lappet-faced vultures.
I picked up the wallet: a familiar enough object, enormous, but seldom full, save after the occasional thundering coup against the bookmakers, when wallet, pockets and sometimes carrier bags would overflow with tenners. The wallet contained little of note. I took out the credit cards, and dutifully snipped them in half. There were two twenty-pound notes; these I pocketed, wondering if this was a crime and deciding that it almost certainly was. And there was also an inordinately thick wodge of betting tickets, fat as a pack of cards. I smiled with troubled affection: it was rare for my father to be in possession of entire betting tickets. They were generally ripped asunder and scattered to the four winds as the horses thundered past the post.
And then my heart performed a crash-halt. After a long moment, it restarted: galloping a finish, tumultuous rhythm. In the last race my father had bet on, his horse had won.
A week later I was richer by several thousand pounds. I did not tell any of the solicitors. My father had bet cunningly and well, placing a great deal of money with a wide selection of bookmakers. He had bet at odds from thirty-three to one down to fives. This was, I had no doubt, intended as a desperate coup to save the yard from extinction. Alas, victory had not been enough: the yard and he were gone. But I collected the money on his behalf. All the bookies paid up. There was no legal obligation for them to do so, but they did, some with good humour, some with resignation. One or two were reluctant, but I browbeat them with threats of the dreadful publicity that would follow any meanness. Popular Trainer’s Son Left Destitute by Heartless Bookie. Popularity: that was the trump card. Everyone had liked my father; many would be furious if he was cheated, as it were, beyond the grave. One of the Great Characters of Racing, said the obituaries, and the bookies, sensitive flowers when it comes to bad publicity, decided it was better to cough. And they coughed and they coughed. For the last time in that house, pockets and carrier bags overflowed with my father’s tenners.
In the final analysis, then, my legacy was this: one pair of binoculars from Leitz of Germany; one racing trilby from Bates of Jermyn Street; and vast wads of tenners. Make a life from that. All right, I will. The madness of grief is much like the madness of love, and so madly I rose to the challenge offered by this legacy. I had no close relatives, no close friends, nowhere to go. I had to vacate the house within six weeks. The logical course was to find a job as assistant trainer somewhere; and it wouldn’t have been hard. But I couldn’t face the idea. I was used to our yard, our system, our horses: my horses. I worked with my father, the idea of working for someone was impossible to contemplate. Just about everything was impossible to contemplate. And so, distracted by grief and overcome with bewilderment, I coldly and deliberately permitted myself a season of insanity. It was intended to be no more than that: a season of madness to be followed by a return to my sort of life, my type of people.
After the funeral, massively attended, and the boozy party paid for by my father’s last wager, I returned to the university. A mixture of compassion and respectable work over three years had secured me a respectable degree. They had no objection to my doing an MSc, once I had told them I could pay my own way. It would be research-based. Subjects for this were discussed, methods suggested, many useful contacts were provided. I spent money on telexes and telephones. Within a fortnight it was all fixed. I was going to turn myself for a season into one of the heroes of my childhood.
I flew on a single ticket to Cape Town, and there I bought a beaten-up but still effective Land-Rover. It was a Series One, a model much treasured by Land-Rover enthusiasts. The metal shelf can be used for opening beer bottles; the headlights are placed close together, giving the vehicle a slightly cross-eyed look. Subsequent models had the headlights conventionally placed: ‘No good,’ George was to say later. ‘Can’t hit trees.’ I drove north into Zimbabwe, and there I took up residence in a centre for field research in one of the national parks. I stayed there for just under a year, living in a bunk in a sort of long house for field scientists. I did not abandon horses, not exactly: in fact, for the first time, the two halves of my childhood were in unity. I produced a fat thesis on the subject of friendship in zebras. I did not dare to call it ‘friendship’, of course: in ethology, which is the study of animal behaviour, anthropomorphism is considered the sin of witchcraft. My paper was entitled A Record of the Interactions and Associations between Non-related Animals in Three Breeding Groups of Equus Burchelli Plains Zebra.
I collected enormous quantities of information: how long unrelated females stayed in each other’s company, and what they did together. I noted a thousand nuances of horsy behaviour, and, deep in Africa, I felt profoundly at home. For each gesture, each shared behaviour, was something I had witnessed at home, when my father and I had turned the mares out into the big field ‘for a buck and a kick and a pick of focken grass’. I made hundreds of graphs and pie charts and bar charts. It was all rather like making up an owner’s bill. Don’t give them a focken great big figure and let them boggle at it: give them lots of small amounts instead. God dwells in the details.
I was given enormous help by Dr Jessica Salmon, who was doing a colossal piece of research for one of the international wildlife organisations. She had done her doctorate at my university, hence the contact, and she was now researching every imaginable aspect of zebra ecology. Her project, lavishly funded, had involved the blood-typing of a large number of animals; thanks to her, the non-kinship of my chosen zebras was an established fact. Her groundwork gave my research its validity. She was planning a popular book to follow her research: ‘I want to do for zebras what George Sorensen and Peter Norrie did for lion all those years ago,’ she said. I was delighted that she used some of my own observations in her final, massively authoritative work, all properly, generously acknowledged, and a grand piece of work it turned out to be as well. But that is by the way.
My own paper was finished after a year or so, and so was my money. I got the work typed up in Harare, and posted it – two copies under separate cover, naturally – back to England. I had always thought that I would then post myself, but I did no such thing. I resolved to try my luck, to try ‘one more year’ in Africa.
I met someone who had worked in tourism, in South Mchindeni
