‘You’ll have to excuse the mess,’ Barry shouts back in a thick, south-east London accent as I habitually take off my shoes at the front door. I step over the body of an outstretched greyhound in the hallway and swerve to avoid a pile of toys en route to his lounge. The enormous room is lined with hundreds of rosettes, shelves bursting with dog-shaped trophies. My nose is overwhelmed by the potent combination of dog, wood smoke and rich pine.
‘Come on, then.’ He stands by the fire with his arms crossed and looks at me expectantly. ‘What do you want to ask me?’ Like a grown-up Artful Dodger, Barry’s glowing cheeks, oval face and round nose give him the look of a loveable rogue.
‘Um… well, a lot of stuff, really,’ I say, taken aback. ‘Like… um… how did you get into dog racing?’
‘Oh, that’s easy,’ he says, ‘me dad was a trainer, wunt he.’ He pauses and looks at me again, his eyes saying ‘next’. I don’t have a next, so we stand in silence for a moment, before he beckons me out to the hall.
‘Look this is ’im ’ere.’ He points to a black-and-white picture of a handsome man kneeling proudly between two greyhounds.
‘And this is the house.’ He points at another picture on the wall, a bird’s-eye view of the house with what looks like a massive racetrack in the back garden.
‘Wow.’ I look at him wide-eyed. ‘You have your own track?’
‘Course we do, mate.’ He beams at me. I like that he calls me mate.
Barry is the trainer of just over a hundred dogs, all of whom live in the kennels behind his house. Contracted to run at least thirty-five dogs a week at Crayford Greyhound Track in Dartford, his kennel is the biggest in the county and the only one with its own track and dog swimming pool.
He takes me out to show me around. The kennels are bright white, surprisingly clean, and ear-shatteringly noisy. The dogs live in pens of two, spread across three wings. Each has a bed filled with shredded paper and a small space for the dogs to walk around. As I walk past each pen, the dogs go crazy, jumping up at the bars and wagging their tails wildly to compete for my attention.
‘Can I touch them?’ I ask Barry.
‘Of course’ – he nods and smiles at me, as enthusiastic as his dogs – ‘greyhounds are very friendly.’
I nervously put my hand through the bars into one of the kennels, where it is greeted by a warm tongue and a soft furry head.
After helping Barry to load up eleven dogs into the wire crates of a large van, we head to Crayford for the evening’s racing. I ask Barry about his livelihood as we make the short journey to the track. He explains to me that his contract at Crayford gives him a modest and sustainable income, which he supplements with training fees of £7 per dog, per day, and renting his track out to other trainers.
‘Do you enjoy doing this?’
‘Yup,’ he says. ‘Love it. But it’s hard work, and you get fed up sometimes, just like any job. You never get a day off, and it takes over your life. But you got to step back, take a chill pill and say, you know what, I would much rather be doing this than sitting in a bloody office.’
‘What are your owners like?’
‘It varies. They can come from all over the country, sometimes from abroad an’ all. One of me owners even ’as an MBE!’
‘Do they ever come up to visit the dogs?’
‘Most of ’em do, yeah. Sunday’s the day for that. They come down the kennels, walk the dogs, give ’em tidbits, pet ’em.’ His voice breaks into laughter. ‘Drive me mad with “why didn’t it win?”’
For Barry’s greyhounds, the day starts at 6.30 a.m., when they are let out into the paddocks while their kennels are cleaned. Then they are ‘galloped’ round the track, taken for a swim if they need it – usually as physical therapy – groomed, let out twice more and fed before bedtime.
‘How do you “gallop” a greyhound?’ I ask him.
‘Easy.’ He smiles at me. ‘One man stands at the top of the field, and one stands at the bottom, and we take it in turns calling ’em.’
This makes me laugh.
‘What?’ Barry grins, laughing along with me, neither of us really knowing why.
When we arrive at the races, I am not allowed through the dogs’ entrance because of anti-doping regulations, so I go through the main entrance and head for the cafeteria. The room feels sterile and dated, flooded with intense artificial light. The smell of fried chicken and chips makes me hungry as a smiling woman with a tattooed arm and a hand full of gold rings hands me a Styrofoam cup of tea through a serving hatch. Groups of middle-aged men sit around in tracksuits and children play tag between the tables. Most of the younger crowd look like they are dressed up for a night on the town.
I am surprised by how many people have ventured out on a Tuesday night and I pose this thought to the man next to me as we queue to place our bets on the dog with the most ridiculous name (that’s definitely what everyone does).
‘Well, you know, greyhound racing used to be the most popular spectator sport in the UK,’ he says, his hands buried deep in his tracksuit bottoms. ‘There were over eighty different tracks, and each could attract up to fifty thousand spectators.’
‘What about now?’ I ask him, struggling to choose between ‘Jabberin Jackie’ and ‘Iruska Tomtiggle’.
‘Well, it ain’t in its prime no more,’ he says. ‘It’s still popular, but a lot has changed in the sport over the decades. It used to be all about the dogs. People were passionate. It’s all they would talk about. But now it’s mainly young people who come here for a bit of fun before a night on the town.’ He gives a dramatic ‘what ya gonna do?’ shrug, presumably accepting of the fact that, without this new line of business from the young revellers, the track simply wouldn’t survive.
During the races I stand outside on the steps with Barry and his fellow trainers. They are a mixed bag; some in tracksuits, others in tweed suits and trilbies. The lady next to me wears a black bomber jacket.
I lead with an ingenious icebreaker. ‘Hi, I’m Lucy.’ (I know, right? Sometimes I amaze myself.)
She looks at me, forces a smile and nods before turning her attention back to the race.
‘Is there anything you don’t like about being a trainer?’ I ask, pushing through her obvious reluctance to engage.
‘People think it’s cruel,’ she says, her eyes not leaving the track.
‘Why do you think that is?’
‘Oh, I dunno,’ she shrugs. ‘Probably because they think we kill our dogs. But we don’t. We love our dogs. We are so proud of ’em. When they win, there’s no feeling like it.’
‘Have you ever killed one of your dogs?’ I hold my breath.
Her head snaps toward me as she takes me in for the first time. ‘Never,’ she says, ‘and we’ve ’ad ’undreds.’
The crowd start to roar, and she turns her attention back to the track as the dogs round the bend in front of the stands. ‘Come on, girl,’ she yells. Everyone joins the cheer, the sound reverberating around the track as the dogs zoom past us, transfixed by the orange windsock masquerading as their prey.
‘Sometimes they have to be put to sleep, mind you.’ She continues to stare in the direction of the dogs as they disappear onto their second lap. ‘You know, if they’re old and sick.’
‘Would you ever want to do anything else?’
‘I couldn’t. None of us could. It’s a passion.’ She looks over at Barry. ‘It’s in our blood, innit, Bar?’ He nods, smiles, and flashes me a wink.
It hasn’t been a great day for Barry, particularly compared to the night before, when he won three out of four races. We come away with one win and a handful of seconds and thirds.
It has been a great evening for me, though; I won £2.50. We debate what I should spend my newfound wealth on during the journey home, before unloading the sleepy dogs back at the kennels and dishing out their well-deserved kibble.
*
The following morning, I drive back down to Kent and walk around the back of Barry’s house, through the adjoining greyhound rehoming centre – Dunrunnin’ – and find him at the helm of his hare machine. The ‘hare’ is a brightly coloured windsock that he operates at varying speeds as the dogs chase it around the sand track.
‘You all right, mate?’ He smiles and stretches his hand out as I walk towards him. ‘I wondered when you’d be ’ere.’
Today Barry is controlling the hare and timing the runs for various owners and trainers who have brought their dogs in for training.
I wander over and join the group of men at the side of the track to watch. One of the dogs lies down in the traps for an impromptu nap, completely ignoring the hare as it zooms past. ‘She is just a bit confused, that’s all.’ Her trainer leaps to her defence as the other men do nothing to hide their amusement. He walks over and rescues her from the traps, bringing her back out to join us at the side of the track. ‘She’ll get there in the end, won’t ya, girl?’ He rubs her all over, bending down for her to lick him on the nose.
Chloe, Barry’s daughter, joins us. She is training to be a vet at Liverpool University, ‘So my dad can get free treatment for his dogs,’ she tells me in her outside voice. A faint chortling comes from the hut.
‘Do you want to come and meet the pups?’ she asks me. I nod vigorously, and she leads me over to two big grass pens on the other side of the track. ‘You always keep pups outside,’ she explains on the way over, ‘so they can run around. It helps them to develop properly.’
The pens are full of gangly, happy dogs, whose whole bodies lean from left to right with the swinging of their tails. She introduces me to Trigger, Boycie, Cassandra, Del Boy, Rodney and Uncle Albert.
It’s time for their daily exercise, so Chloe opens the gate and the dogs bound past us, barking and leaping in the air like gazelles. They pelt out onto the track and start to gallop madly, round and round, stopping to play now and then, before accelerating off like coiled springs.
The manager of Dunrunnin’, a lady called Karen, walks past the edge of the track and Chloe beckons her to join us in the middle.
‘They make such wonderful pets,’ she says, as one of the dogs comes over to greet us. ‘The only problem is that they get a bit institutionalised when they are racing. Most of them will have never been in a house before, never seen a cat, never seen a glass door,’ she laughs, ‘so they tend to run into ’em, full pelt.’
‘Are some of them too vicious to rehome?’ I ask.
‘It is almost unheard of for a greyhound to be human aggressive,’ she says. ‘But they can sometimes chase smaller dogs because they don’t know what they are. Most will be rehomed but occasionally they are too nervous, and no one wants them.’
My face screws up. ‘What happens to those ones?’
She rolls her eyes. ‘They end up hogging my bloody sofa!’