Читать книгу Jumbo to Jockey: Fasting to the Finishing Post - Dominic Prince - Страница 9

Chapter Four

A year before we married, Rose and I were looking for a house to rent in Dorset. I had rented a small cottage on the Rushmore estate on Cranborne Chase for several years but it was little more than a 1950s semi-detached prefab. In the winter it was wet and cold, and even in the summer the landscape was devoid of all joy. With no garden to speak of, it was little more than a bachelor pad in the countryside.

Teddy Bourke and his family own the village of Chettle, which borders the Rushmore estate in Cranborne. It was in stunned amazement that Rose and I traipsed up through the woods on the outskirts of the village one Saturday afternoon to look at Keeper’s Lodge. In a clearing stood a colonial-style bungalow, a former gamekeeper’s cottage built from brick and flint more than 150 years ago, nestling on the boundary of an ancient woodland. To say it was both beautiful and tranquil would be to misrepresent it. Keeper’s Lodge is unique. On our first viewing, as we opened the back door a herd of sheep ran out of the front. The grass around the house was knee-high, birdsong, like some distant melody, butterflies fluttered in the sunlight.

The house was gas-lit and was little more than a scruffy oasis in the midst of an overgrown wilderness. But it was perfect. There was – and still is – no rubbish collection, no postal delivery, no proper road and very few services. In the village there was a stable full of horses, and in August 1993 we took on the lease. We have been there ever since.

The children have had the benefit of growing up both in London and in a wild place with woods and birds and cows and farm animals and a small shoot that I run. Except for the supply of electricity, which we now have (don’t let anyone try to convince you that gas lighting is romantic: it isn’t) and an unkempt garden, not much has changed in the seventeen years we have been here. Friends in the village have married, given birth and died. People have come and gone but all around Chettle is an untouched idyll. Together we have shot the deer that roam in the woods, the pheasants that sit in the hedgerows and the partridge that squat in the barley fields.

Kevin and Rose Hicks have been in Chettle as long as we have and live for horses and little else. When we visited, the stables held a mix of big, hefty hunters, ex-racehorses and a small Shetland pony called Mandy. Aged five, Lara used to go down to the Hicks’s yard in the village to groom her. Just as I had done as a child, she would lovingly scrub all the mud off her, sponge out her eyes and ears and pick out her feet. Then we’d tack her up with her saddle and bridle and off we’d go for a stroll round the village.

It was to Chettle that I retreated for the winter half-term in February to get the first taste of what it would be like to get back on a horse. Apart from the occasional slip, when I gave in to the temptation of a groaning dinner table, I had managed to stick resolutely to the diet despite the shaking of a few heads of those who still could not believe what I had got myself into. I had lost just over half a stone, and was lighter now than I had been for ten years. The circuits around the park that were getting faster had given me enough confidence to think that I was making the necessary progress to pull this off. All I had to do now was get on a horse and be able to stay on it through a walk, a trot, then later a canter and a gallop.

For every rider, being on a horse is all about the gallop. It is instant gratification. It is also daring, exciting, exhilarating and dangerous, very like the way most riders like to live their lives. I don’t think an accountant has ever galloped; neither has a man who digs the road for a living. But the journalist who has just landed the big story is at it full pelt. Footballers gallop, the ones playing on a Sunday at the local rec and the ones playing in a cup final at Wembley. They gallop. It’s daring and emotional, and it is also draining. I knew that if I could learn how to gallop on a horse again then I would be some way towards getting myself out of this midlife crisis slump. Some men in the same position leave their families and disappear with young girls; others buy yachts. I have no inclination to do either.

The first port of call on arriving at Chettle, already dreaming of putting on my racing silks, was to Kevin and Rose. They were aware of my little adventure, but I was unsure how to broach the subject. You don’t just lend a horse to a 15-stone man and wave him off down the lane.

Ever since I’ve known Kevin and Rose I’ve assumed that all Rose’s horses are either deaf or impervious to her screaming and hollering: ‘Get up, you fucking bastard, or I’ll have you’ is typical of the sort of riposte she often makes to an equine miscreant. Not only that, Rose also likes to ensure that anyone within half a mile can hear her telling her horses off. They do, because you can’t help but hear her when she hollers. For a woman, her expletives are quite extraordinary. I start telling Rose about the idea of my race and I can see she is quite impressed. I have yet to find a trainer, but she offers me her own retired racehorse, Edward, to exercise. ‘He’ll carry you, even at fifteen stone,’ she says.

On the face of it this is a great idea as Edward is in the village and I can ride every time I’m here. I say ‘on the face of it’ because it is only later that Rose tells me, ‘Edward bucks a bit, oh, and he can be a bit strong. But don’t worry, you’ll be all right.’ ‘A bit strong’ means that I won’t be able to stop him until he has galloped all the way to our nearest town, Blandford Forum. ‘Bucks a bit’ means that he upends himself onto his forelegs, puts his nose between his legs and tries like hell to get rid of his rider.

I decided not to take up Rose’s kind offer, at least for the moment. When I got home I enquired at the local riding stable about the possibilities of riding one of their horses. I was cut short before I had a chance to deliver my full pitch about fulfilling a childhood dream, and was told in no uncertain terms that I was not going anywhere near their stables. This was a riding school, not a circus, I was told. I put the phone down, wondering where to turn to next.

I opted to take up Rose’s offer after all. So, most mornings we rode out. Edward was fine; he didn’t buck, he moved forward fluently. We had a great time in the early mornings, slow, long canters, pheasants shooting out of the hedgerows. Walks and trots and talking all the time about riding and racing and Rose side-eyeing me as if to say, ‘You really are mad, you are.’

On the first Sunday of our stay, after walking Billy we were invited to Cranborne for lunch by some old friends, the Campbells, who lived in a house almost as charmingly dishevelled as our own. The drink flowed and the food, piled high, was brought to the table. I made a vague gesture of waving away a second helping before giving in, thinking that as soon as I got on a horse I’d be able to burn off the excess calories twice as quickly. We feasted on rare roast lamb, crisp, succulent and bloody, potatoes, spoonfuls of cheese and great hunks of bread. Dessert was a crumble with cream; there were flagons of wine. By the end of the afternoon I could feel myself bulging out of my shirt once again, like a character from a Thomas Hardy novel.

Bloated and content, I waited for the appropriate moment before telling the assembled company about my endeavour.

‘I need to ride a horse, every day’, I said.

It was a sort of ‘my kingdom for a horse’ moment when George told me that I could exercise her horse, Daz, which was stabled at her brother’s house in Cranborne, a ten-minute drive from Chettle. Perfect.

George Campbell has no fear of anything, least of all riding horses, and she loves to get her friends involved in her equine exploits. She once pleaded with me to allow her to take Lara out hunting. Envious of her fearlessness I almost agreed, thinking it would be a great thing for a pony-mad girl to do. It would be the ideal opportunity for her to experience the rush of adrenalin and fear that I hoped she would come to love.

George’s husband, Mouse, however, had other ideas. He kicked me sharply under the table and mouthed silently, ‘Do you not know we are in the presence of a mad lady here? Under no circumstances should you put her in charge of your only daughter on the hunting field. Do not do it.’ There are quite a lot of people in Dorset who agree with Mouse. And, as I was to find out later, when George is on a horse she knows only two paces – walk and flat-out gallop. She has suffered innumerable broken bones and bumps to the head but when I ask her if she ever feels nervous she says, with a huge, haunting grin sweeping across her face: ‘If it’s meant to be it’s meant to be.’ And, of course, she has a point.

By early March, two months after I started the diet, I had already lost three-quarters of a stone and was feeling much better for it. It was a moment of truth as Jack and I drove to Cranborne to meet Daz. She was a sweetie. Horses are measured in hands, from the ground to the bottom of the neck, and a hand is equal to four inches. Standing at over eighteen hands, Daz was a Thoroughbred-cross shire horse, and towered over both of us like a benevolent giant. She was such a big animal that I had to use a stepladder to get onto her and I knew that if I came off I wouldn’t be able to get back on again.

I looked around for my jockey skullcap, something you have to wear by law when exercising racehorses. All I had on was a flat cap that I liked to think made me look like the late, great Sir Noel Murless, one of the few jockeys in the history of the turf to have been knighted, and latterly a Newmarket trainer extraordinaire as well as being patron of and mentor to Lester Piggott. But that is where the comparison ended. Sitting on top of Daz, I realized that it was a hell of a long way to the ground. If I came off her and landed on my nut it would not be remotely amusing, but George told me that it was an absolute rule that if I rode Daz I had to wear a flat cap, not a skullcap. When I mentioned that if I fell off and landed head first on the tarmacked lanes of Cranborne, my children would be fatherless, she laughed. George didn’t even wear a helmet when she was pregnant with her daughter Martha. I now understand more fully why her husband didn’t want her to take Lara hunting.

My dad used to drive me mad about the type of headgear I rode in. He would read every technical report in every scientific journal that warned of the perils of the commonplace fibreglass hunting hat with the fixed peak. With great amusement he would read out the reports citing fractures that might splinter and end up embedded in the forehead of the rider. In the mid-1970s his advice had been that I should ride in a helmet favoured by Securicor delivery drivers, with a thick mattress to protect the back of the neck and a visor to cover the face. This did not go down well with me. Part of the attraction of the horse is the inherent danger, but the fact that equestrian headgear has been drastically modified since I was a child is not lost on me. My dad was right, I was wrong. Still, what I remember loving about those early days with horses was being at a gallop and feeling the wind in my hair, with a complete disregard for any health and safety considerations.

It is only when I was firmly on top of her, with no easy way down, that George told me Daz was blind in one eye. No one seemed to know much about her, bar the one irrefutable fact that she did seem to be a very kind old lady. But, like a lot of kind old ladies, she had her nasty streak and hers was that she did not like going through gates. This made me nervous. Every time we approached a gate she would back off very quickly and her front legs rose just a little off the ground, which caused me to lean forward and grab anything I could to stay balanced on top of her. I sensed that she’d had a previous punch-up with someone at a gate, and had probably been walloped around the head with a stick once upon a time. She needed to be cajoled and stroked and caressed, not beaten. When I was younger I would have been inclined to give her a bash with a stick, too, but, at the age of forty-seven, I don’t carry a stick and she did seem to respond to kindness, not brute force. Any physical confrontation with her would be laughable since she was probably ten times stronger than me, so I sat quietly in the saddle and waited for her to make up her mind.