Читать книгу Jumbo to Jockey: Fasting to the Finishing Post - Dominic Prince - Страница 7

Chapter Two

I was six years old, completely enamoured and unable to move for the sight of it. I was walking with my mother through a mottled concrete yard near Mill Hill, an affluent suburb of north London. The treacly, ammonia smell of horse piss coming out of the stables that housed the horses filled the gullies and drains. Those aromas do nothing for some; others dislike them so intensely that it repels them immediately. I was overcome with delight. Even forty years later I can still smell it and I can see in front of me that little Exmoor pony, Conker, with his mealy muzzle and wonky trot.

Conker stood on a bed of yellow straw, behind a huge, creosoted stable door that he could barely see over, he’d rest his chin on the top of the door and look skyward. The straw was dusty but smelt fresh and I was timid in the company of this huge creature that stood peering down at me. In reality he was tiny but from the eyes of a six-year old boy he looked an equine giant. There was a water bucket that needed refilling and I opened the top latch and walked into the stable to reach it. I thought he would swing round and kick me but he didn’t. Instead, he put his nose forward and nickered and nuzzled the top of my head. When I went to pick up his bucket he moved backwards so as not to frighten me. I darted out of the door, filled the bucket to the top with water and went back into his stable. He did nothing, just looked at me, then he came forward and put his nose in the bucket and gulped great mouthfuls of water. I backed away, still afraid that he might hurt me. His throat contracted and expanded as he swallowed the water, then he came towards me and slobbered water flecked with grain from his last meal all down my arm. I just stood there looking at him in wonder.

Conker wasn’t the first pony I had come across but he was the nicest. He smelt like a bar of mouldy soap. I could rub my face in his mane, and my hands in his coat and they would come out covered in a sticky, waxy coating of scurf. It was one of the most delicious smells I had ever come across. He was small, just over twelve hands, and I would often ride him bare-back in order to get the scurf to stick to my trousers so that I could smell them later and remind myself of him. He had a funny gait, almost lopsided, but he was very gentle with it.

Aged six, stuck in London and toiling with parentally imposed chores, I threw tantrums when it came to piano lessons and extra school tuition. The only place I wanted to be was in the stables with the horses. Such was my passion that once, when a great brute of a pony stood on my foot, rather than push him off I stood there wallowing in the pleasure of the excruciating pain. When I eventually pulled my foot from under his iron-clad hoof I saw that it had taken the skin off the top of four toes. They were bruised and bleeding but I was very proud of my injury, and for weeks afterwards I would look at the bruised and battered foot and think only of how much happiness the incident had given me.

‘Why can’t we live in the country, where the horses are?’ I repeatedly asked my mother. Throughout my childhood I pestered my parents to move. Once, my mum drove me into the country and there, behind a post and rails fence, was the most perfect black Welsh cob I had ever seen. He was in a field with a ramshackle house next to it surrounded by acres of wide-open space. I turned to my mum and said: ‘Are we coming to live here?’ She told me that we were, ‘But not just yet.’ It was an unintentionally cruel thing to say, and it wouldn’t have been practical, at least not for her. I, on the other hand, could think of nothing more perfect.

The most misguided hope I fostered was a return to Slades Farm in Somerset, to reclaim the family holding. My grandfather Percy had somewhat rashly let a part of it to the Bennett family, and with it the Bennetts acquired an agricultural tenancy – which could have lasted for generations. The three Hazzard sisters, of whom my mother was one, had been forced into the sale, in as much as they could not get vacant possession over the farm so it was worth considerably less than it might have been and consequently did not get a great price for it. I had been told the story of Percy many times, and even at the age of six I was already plotting and scheming as I had it in the back of my mind that one day we would return to reclaim what I saw as our inheritance.

At Slades Farm my mother and her two sisters had been brought up with horses, dogs, cows, pigs and chickens. When I did not grow out of the desire to bolt with terror every time I saw a dog – something that neither of my parents could understand – my mother, the psychologist, reasoned that putting me on a horse would overcome my fear of animals. And it did so almost instantly. What she did not reckon with, though, was that she ended up with something far worse than her small son bolting in a sweaty frenzy from a dog. With my new-found obsession with horses I lost interest in all things my parents valued, like schoolwork, the arts, reading and socially acceptable behaviour. But my fixation was not the romantic pony club schoolgirl type; it was a near-fatal mixture of love, hate and fear.

Long after I had stopped riding, in early 2009 a condition known as Equine Addiction Syndrome was coined by Professor David Nutt, the former drugs adviser to the Labour government of Gordon Brown. Equasy, as he named it, was responsible for at least ten deaths a year. According to his research, an addiction to riding horses was statistically far more dangerous than taking ecstasy or smoking cannabis. His rationale was that for every 350 exposures to the horse there was one serious adverse affect or injury, whereas for every 10,000 exposures to ecstasy there was only one adverse incident. His argument was simple: horse riding is more addictive and, indeed, more dangerous than taking Class A drugs. It was the same Professor Nutt who, also in 2009, raised the spectre that alcohol and tobacco were more dangerous than ecstasy. He was promptly sacked by a government that didn’t like what it was hearing.

Although it took me years to articulate it fully, being put on that first pony, aged six, planted a seed that grew into an addiction the older I got and the worse the situation became at home. The musty, oaty smell of the beast and the heat that rose off it after exercise became entwined as a powerful symbol of all that I could trust and feel safe around while living a family life that was gradually getting worse with every passing year. There was a helplessness but also a fear of this animal that could, if it needed to, become ferocious. The anxiety many children show around horses is not cowardice; it is the same as that of the person who cannot swim and who has to jump into the sea so as to learn how to swim in case they ever get into serious difficulties. They may be nervous but they have to learn. That was how it was with me and ponies. But as I got to ride more often, so my confidence grew and I was relating more to horses than to home life, the family, school and people around me. But the problem I had was that we lived in London, not in the countryside, and it only became worse the older I got, and I was stuck with living out my dream watching horse racing on television.

Showjumping on the BBC was a favourite, and in 1970 I watched my first Grand National on television, sitting right up against the screen as though I might actually be able to climb into the paddock if I concentrated hard enough. Later, in 1971, watching Mill Reef winning the Epsom Derby was the first piece of real equine drama I witnessed, and the most exciting thing I had ever watched on television. The seventies were the heyday of British racing, and the country seemed to stop work weeks before the Derby, enthralled by the drama of the build-up. There were front-page headlines almost every day, and that year all the talk was of the little wonder horse called Mill Reef and his rich American owner, the banking heir Paul Mellon.

The television news reports called that year’s race one of the finest Derbys ever run, and I watched it slumped in front of the television in a smoke-filled drawing room, staying with my mother’s former neighbours at Gospel Ash Farm in Somerset. I was in horse heaven. Tiny Mill Reef, at barely fifteen hands, devoured the lush turf beneath his feet, flying over the ground before him, his rivals flailing helplessly in his slipstream. My heart pounded as I willed him to win. Away from my parents and surrounded by people who were just as fixated by the little horse as I was, I had never felt more at home. This was where I belonged.

After the race I went off with Victoria Gibbs to tack up her skewbald pony, Nugget. Even though it was mid-June, Nugget was covered in mud, having found a place out of sight in which to wallow and roll. The pair of us worked for hours scrubbing his coat, picking out his feet, sponging out his nostrils and eyes. I put his bridle on and he threw his head in the air as I tried to get the bit to connect with his mouth, but I was only nine and quite short so every time he wanted to avoid the bridle he just lifted his head up in the air, knowing that I wouldn’t be able to reach, even on tiptoes. He blew out his stomach as we tried to tighten the girth straps. Victoria and I trotted off down the flint-strewn track and I worried about Nugget’s feet; he had no shoes on and was uncomfortable, often darting onto the grass verge where it was softer underfoot. When we got back my hands, pullover and jeans reeked of Nugget.

Riding Nugget during the holidays, I was happy beyond anything I had ever experienced. At the end of the summer we would return to London and that irresistible waxy smell would fade from my clothes as we drove east towards London along the A303. I was not enamoured by the prospect of the drudgery of London life and the world that I inhabited, as a suburban child, with no horses in a stable outside the back door. I knew, like a person who feels he is in another body, that I was growing up in a wrong place. If I had been born a generation earlier I would have grown up with the animals on the farm, horses, hunting and racing. As soon as we got home I shut my bedroom door and lay in bed longing for the day that we could return to the farm and I could get back in the saddle.

* * *

Chiswick Comprehensive School was in the same league as Holland Park Comprehensive. A former grammar school, it was staffed half with old-school grammar school teachers and half with right-on lefties. I started there in 1972, aged eleven, with children of other parents who also should have known better, among them the sons and daughters of politicians, academics, doctors, lawyers, film stars and businessmen. I hated every minute of it. The problem was that all the children were guinea pigs and the parents were indulging themselves in a socialist experiment that for a lot of us turned out to be a complete disaster. My mother told me years later that the comprehensive system was a ‘brave new hope’ that was embraced by all right-thinking parents.

The teaching was truly appalling but the politics of the time dictated that the system and the school would work perfectly. No one, least of all the parents, was looking at what was going on and I ran riot at every opportunity. I was constantly being caught smoking, bunking off to go and ride and very often just not bothering to turn up at all. Following my dad’s diagnosis, my behaviour spiralled out of control. I couldn’t and wouldn’t concentrate in the classroom. Homework was abandoned amid great tantrums, and it took very little for me to start playing up as I moved listlessly from one term to the next, only just avoiding being expelled.

Locked in my bedroom as punishment for yet another misdemeanour, I wrote stories about horses and executed very bad paintings of them, too. It seemed that it was only when I was in the company of horses that I calmed down, and I took every chance I could to return to the stables in Harefield where my pony, Bracken, was kept at livery. The only one who put his finger on the personal issues I had was our physical education teacher, Mr Reynolds, a tall, athletic man who loved his job. He once said to my class that there was only one boy, in his opinion, who would ever be as passionate about what he did in later life as he was. He knew I was flailing around at school, but he could see that I had a passion I couldn’t yet fully articulate and he had faith that I would eventually come good. It was a strange moment: I knew that out of all those children sitting in front of him in that class I gave him the most grief, and yet he chose to praise me above all of them. There were others who were not so kind: the French teacher, Mr Bumford, who one day for no apparent reason came and stood on my fingers as they were splayed on the floor behind me. Even my classmates were shocked.

Everything changed when, aged twelve, I met Emma. One year above me, Emma Burge was small and blonde and, like me, horse-mad. We started bunking off school together, went riding, smoked Silk Cut Blues. I tried to sell an Oxo cube dyed with green ink as a lump of hashish to some of our friends. And almost every minute that we were together was spent talking about ponies.

My first entrepreneurial foray was not a great success and I had to return all the money we’d earned when the deception was uncovered, but Emma gave life at school a new dimension. Her parents had a house in the New Forest where Emma kept her pony, a fiery upstart called Fred, and a donkey called Jasper. Turned onto his back and held down by local farm-hands, Jasper used to have his ever-growing feet clipped so that he could walk comfortably. At weekends we would go down and visit and Emma would drive Jasper and I would ride along beside her on Fred as we ambled through the New Forest. We had much in common since her parents understood nothing about horses either, and I was saved from myself, at least temporarily.

Emma was the first girl I fell in love with. One of the wonderful things about her was that she always washed her hair with Brut shampoo; sportsmen like Henry Cooper, Kevin Keegan and Barry Sheene were famous for advertising Brut aftershave during that period. It was really cheap stuff but Emma managed to make her hair smell incredible whenever she washed her hair with it, and I would hold her in a boyish embrace and nuzzle her hair, inhaling the scent, just as I had done with Conker. When we eventually drifted apart I would sometimes buy a bottle of Brut just to remind myself what she smelt like. More than thirty years later, Emma is still crazy about horses, but now she has stables of her own and she drives the horses competitively.

Emma and I went our separate ways when she was sent to Dartington Hall School, a wayward and very costly institution in Devon, while I stayed at Chiswick for another agonising year. Although we stayed in touch, Devon was a long way away for a twelve-year-old. She made new friends, but occasionally she would turn up in London and we’d talk about horses, smoke a bit of dope and reminisce about the ghastliness of Chiswick Comp., and then she was gone again. She got married at nineteen to a wheelwright and they went to live in Wales. The marriage only lasted a short time and produced a baby. One day, fed up with the life of a wheel-wright, Emma jumped on board Fred the pony and rode him about two hundred miles from Wales to the New Forest, where her parents still lived, with the baby strapped up in front of her. She could have gone by car but loved the pony, and didn’t want to be separated from him. That’s what horses can do to you.

While I was tearing the school apart, able only to concentrate on horses, my parents’ main concern was my father’s health. It was not the first time illness had stalked the family. My brother Rupert, born in 1963, very nearly died before he’d even got started. Water on the brain made his head swell to gargantuan proportions, which engendered a very strong protective love in my mother and meant that more often than not I was left to my own devices. Meanwhile, the pain got worse for my father, and he stubbornly kept to his walking stick even though it was obvious to everyone around him that he should be in a wheelchair. His muscles started to seize up and once he was mistaken for a drunk as he stumbled along the pavement willing his legs to work. There were pills and potions, too, and, early on, he drank vast quantities of sunflower oil. Research had suggested it might help with the symptoms and I willed it to cure him.

As I struggled through my teenage years, so my dad’s decline became more rapid, until he was spending a lot of time in hospital undergoing one test after another. Going to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford to collect him, following yet another day-long examination, he was sitting, a stick in each hand, still just able to shuffle around a bit when I arrived. He was surrounded by wheelchairs, and people so crippled by disease and so obviously in pain and distress that it was difficult to lift my eyes off the floor. This was what was going to happen to him and I couldn’t bear to look. I asked him how his tests had gone ‘Well,’ he said, at the top of his voice, then pausing for effect, ‘they said if I was a racehorse they’d have to shoot me!’ He roared with laughter. The other patients were not so amused.

I left school as soon as I could, just after my sixteenth birthday and before they threw me out. In the hot summer of 1977 I shaved every last hair from my head and turned up at school the following day, surrounded by crowds of admiring friends, and was duly frogmarched from the premises. I was at last free but prospects were pretty bleak. An O level in English Language was the sum total of my formal education.

My parents had dreamt of me going to university, but from where they were sitting prison looked a more likely option, conflict abounded and we were never far from a row or argument about my lack of progress. At least I had an entire summer with horses to look forward to. During those long and painful months, my mother, who had just about given up on me, happened upon a course in Horse Business Management at an agricultural college in Witney, Oxfordshire. It was a rare moment of understanding between a sixteen-year-old and his forty-nine-year-old mother.

The drive to Witney on that hot summer morning was memorable, largely because my mother and I were filled with hope and optimism for the first time for as long as either of us could remember. All was not lost, and she had finally got the message that it was with horses that I was happiest. The course she had found would let me spend every day with horses learning how they worked. I would be taught about veterinary medicine, breeding, nutrition and the racing industry.

I studied under the tutelage of John Onions, a man who single-handedly changed the course of my life. Onions looked like a hobbit and had huge enthusiasm for the horse business. He knew its foibles and machinations and he also knew just how complex an industry it was if you scratched under the surface. I was taught alongside a journalist from the Sporting Life, various sons of farmers, an insurance broker and lots of pony-mad girls who were always phoning Mummy from the college call boxes to check if Moonshine or Dobbin had been fed. I felt I had arrived in a world that I’d been searching for for years.

I lodged with Professor David Fieldhouse and his wife, Sheila, at Lower Farm in Leafield, a few miles outside Witney. A tidy, utilitarian smallholding with horses and cows, it was a perfect rustic idyll. But there was an intellectual element prevalent, too. David was Professor of Colonial and Naval History at Nuffield College and brought a rather stern rigour to the breakfast table every morning. A prolific scribbler and studious intellectual, he encouraged me to write. As I sat puffing on cigarettes, putting words down on a clapped-out Olivetti typewriter in my bedroom, the scales began to fall from my eyes. David would correct the English, punctuate the prose and push me along, all the while smoking his pipe. The Fieldhouses’ politics were about as different from my own parents’ as it was possible to be and lodging there gave me my first exposure to another way of life.

It was while staying with them that I was introduced to the showjumping correspondent for the Daily Mail, who had been a stable lad himself and knew a great deal about horses. In time I managed to supplement my meagre income at the stables by penning articles for Pony Magazine and Dog International. The first fee I received was £100, enough to cover my board and lodgings for a month.

The atmosphere at Lower Farm was both bohemian and agricultural. Everyone in the family rode and, each morning, I would help them mucking out the stables and feeding the horses before attending college, and then again in the evening before taking one of the horses out for a ride. I loved the routine, and, for the first time in my life, didn’t have to be bellowed at to get out of bed in the morning. Instead, before breakfast, whatever the weather, I would wait for the rest of the family to get up before we walked over to the stables and groomed, picked out the horses’ feet and tacked them up.

In the winter Katy, their youngest daughter, and I would go hunting and in the summer to pony shows, and the problems at home seemed like a distant memory. Meanwhile, my father was becoming increasingly curmudgeonly, with even his politics veering alarmingly to the right as he got angrier and angrier as the illness took hold. I struggled to understand what he was going through, but having gone deaf at twenty-one and then developing multiple sclerosis in his forties, it was no wonder that he was raging at the injustice of it all.

Following college, a job riding and breaking in young horses beckoned – but I got into trouble again almost immediately, primarily because I did not get on with my employer. The family I worked for in Buckingham didn’t like the rough-hewn manner that I affected. There was a ‘them and us’ divide, and if something was wrong with a horse you went to the back door of the big house, once used by the servants, to tell them. In the morning horses were tacked up for the master, his wife and daughter. Manes and tails were brushed out, hooves picked out and oiled and then the animals were paraded in front of them. For my part I did not like the way they treated the people who worked for them. They viewed their staff as an underclass and wanted me to become a member of it. There was an argument, words were spoken and I returned to my parents’ home jobless. After the magic of the previous year, it was an unexpected setback as my mother sighed, wondering what she was going to do with me. Exasperated, she gave me an ultimatum. Be in a job within a week, or they would no longer house me.

That was more than thirty years ago. Aged nineteen, I weighed close to 10 stone and could ride a horse well. I could canter, gallop and jump large fences, and was one step away from making the move into a life surrounded by horses. Jobs with horses were then, and still are, badly paid. Conditions are treacherous and I had very little to fall back on if I didn’t make it. In a rush of blood to the head I abandoned the ambitions for a life with horses and instead took my Olivetti to London. I have been there ever since.