Mules are not, as a rule, at all fastidious as to the quality of the forage offered to them.
The War Office, Animal Management (London, 1923)
JASPER AND I started to get excited as we got closer to Richmond. It was a long time since we had been near any metropolitan pleasures. Richmond had a Georgian theatre, a cinema and numerous restaurants. Even Wainwright, not a man for urban delights, had felt a quickening of the pulse on approaching the town. It might have been my imagination, but I thought Jethro picked up his pace as well. He snorted in an appreciative manner. Although the next moment, he tried to nibble at a yew tree; we had to stop him as the leaves would not have done his digestion any good.
We met a farmer in a tractor who complimented Jethro as a ‘bonny animal’ – although at first he said he didn’t know what the hell he was looking at.
‘So he’s a mule. Don’t see many of them.’
He pointed out the effects of a summer hailstorm that had demolished many of the sheds on the nearby slopes and ripped through a lot of the trees.
‘Unbelievable, that was. A freak, freak storm. There’s a farmer over there who had to pay out over £150,000 and he wasn’t even insured. Nobody expected anything like that.’
Just past Applegarth Farm, I started to feel we were leaving Swaledale behind and entering Richmondshire proper. The low evening light was falling from the south-west over the russets and ochres of the woods on the riverbank, while a few striking red ornamental trees from Richmond’s outlying houses punctuated the green fields. It was a richer, more lush setting than the Dales had provided.
As we swept around a broad grass bridleway that made perfect walking for Jethro, there were tantalising first glimpses of the towers of Richmond, both the folly of Culloden and the unmistakable profile of the Norman castle. In the foreground, the bracken had browned to a coppery sheen. The Swaleview Caravan Park below us undercut the sublimity of the scene – but overall it was still a pincushion of reds, yellows and greens.
Looking up, I could see the monument for Williance’s Leap on the skyline, above the cliffs of Whitcliffe Scar. The story goes that Robert Williance, a local lead miner, was out with a hunting party one day in 1606 when he got lost in thick fog. He and his horse fell over the cliff. The horse was killed but protected his rider from the impact; Williance survived with only a broken leg. Unable to move after the fall, and while waiting for rescue, he slit open the dead horse’s stomach and stuck his broken leg inside, a trick later adopted by Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant.
I wondered whether Jethro would have been equally heroic and tried to break my fall if we had met any precipitous moments – although somehow I doubted it. And anyway, I had to get him back to the RSPCA in one piece. The nearest we had come to danger so far was when Jethro had spooked crossing a stream and shoulder-charged me. Having 300 kilos of mule come at you was like being tackled by two Jonah Lomus at the same time and I had hit the deck hard – though it had left me with little more than a few bruises and some wounded pride.
The wind started to pick up strongly. The trees over the path bent down low towards each other, their branches whipping sideways, stretching out like serpents. The sound as we went through some of the small woods was extraordinary, as if the trees were talking to one another, and doing so in a guttural Viking tongue, all clashing consonants.
Walking into Richmond, we passed people with their heads down against the wind, clutching bags of shopping, focussed on the pavement. No one noticed us. Coming along the street was a determined young woman with walking poles in both hands and a backpack, who was clearly doing the Coast-to-Coast the other way round. For a moment, I felt like asking what lay ahead for us, but she had such a running gait on her that I didn’t want to disturb her rhythm – and there was the worry she might spike one of Jethro’s hooves with her poles.
We had arranged for Jethro to spend the night in stables outside Richmond, at Brough Park. This was courtesy of a kind man called John Haslam who I had met on an earlier visit to Richmond. He had asked what I was planning to do next and when I told him about this trip with a mule, John and his wife Jude offered both stabling for Jethro and dinner for Jasper and me. Not only was this extremely kind, but it also kept up the strange alliteration governing our journey, by which so many people we met had names beginning with ‘J’.
John Haslam had also invited some friends of his to dinner – Austin Lynch and Tim Culkin, a gay couple who used to teach at John’s school and now ran what sounded an upmarket bed-and-breakfast in the centre of Richmond called Millgate House.
I went to see them the next day for coffee. ‘Upmarket’ didn’t do it justice. It was to your average B&B what a Jaguar is to a Ford Fiesta. There were antique furnishings dripping off the walls, and fine Turkish carpets, in what was a stately Georgian house off Richmond’s handsome marketplace. A large Renaissance picture of the Annunciation dominated the dining room, to the amusement of a couple who were staying there. ‘I’ve never had an angel looking down at me over breakfast,’ said the woman.
Both Austin and Tim were of pensionable age, but looked in excellent shape: Austin had spiky hair and wore a bright blue sleeveless gilet which showed off tattooed eagles on both arms (‘there’s another tattoo on my back’); Tim was taller and more relaxed, like a gentle John Le Mesurier. Austin had been Head of Art at Richmond School, Tim the Head of Sixth Form.
‘This was an old wool merchant’s house,’ Tim told me over coffee, which he prepared meticulously – ‘exactly twenty-five seconds to brew’ – and served in a silver pot. ‘It was completely rundown when we bought it thirty-seven years ago. Part of the ceiling had collapsed. It was like a lot of Georgian buildings in the seventies. Undervalued and forgotten.’
‘So is that how long you’ve been together?’ I asked. ‘Thirty-seven years?’
‘No, no, no,’ said Austin. ‘We’ve been together much longer than that. We’ve been together forty-seven years.’ They looked at each other as if in mutual wonder at this longevity. ‘We had places of our own before we bought this jointly.’
‘And,’ Austin added, ‘we were one of the first couples to have a civil partnership. On the very first date you could, 21 December 2005.’
Both of them had originally moved up from London. I wondered how accepting they had found Richmond and North Yorkshire of their homosexuality.
‘Well, of course,’ said Tim, ‘London was and is far more liberal. But really, we’ve hardly had any problems here at all. People just let us get on with it. When we moved here, we were teaching at what was then the grammar school before it became the big Richmond comprehensive with 1,600 pupils. There was a time in the 1980s when it was very difficult with Clause 28, and the worry we might be criticised for promoting homosexuality in schools. But in general, it’s been fine. In fact, at the school they’ve recently elected an openly gay student as Head Boy. Just shows how far we’ve come.
‘What was more difficult for me,’ Tim continued, ‘was the period before I came up here. I spent twenty years or so never telling anybody – my family and friends – about who I was. It was terrible. I was brought up a strict Catholic. We both were. When he discovered, my father sent me to a psychiatrist to “cure me”.’
Austin joined in. They had the agreeable habit, common to many couples who have been together a long time, of sensing when to pick up each other’s baton.
‘I knew from the age of three that I was gay. I would keep looking at the pictures of Michelangelo’s David in a picture book. I’m surprised the pages didn’t fall out!
‘So, in answer to your earlier question, yes: we are accepted here, and they know us, and we have this beautiful house and have been around a while, so I suppose we have some status – but I think sometimes they treat us as court jesters, outsiders who are tolerated. Not that we push it in people’s faces. Some of my more militant gay friends come up from London and say, “Why don’t you wander round the marketplace holding hands?” But that’s not the point.
‘Although it’s so beautiful, Richmond has kept its working-class feel. It’s down to earth. And we like that. Of course, a lot of Georgian houses have been restored – and the council’s given grants for people to do that. But it’s not self-conscious. It hasn’t got the window boxes. And I think it’s really important it’s not a commuter place. If we were just fifteen minutes from Newcastle or Leeds, it would be different.’
We were sitting near the windows of one of the reception rooms. There must have been some dozen grandfather clocks against the walls, all ticking with disconcerting asynchronicity; below was their sheltered walled garden, filled with hostas, peonies and roses. A secret garden.
‘Did you know that Lewis Carroll came from Richmond?’ asked Austin.
I didn’t, but I could believe it.
‘Charles Dodgson, as he was then. His father was the rector at one of the parishes near here. So he went to Richmond School, the one we taught at. He had a bad stammer.’
I had never thought of the Alice books as being written by a Yorkshireman. But it made sense. The bluntness of the Duchess telling off her cook, let alone the various queens. The long tea party. The fondness for nonsense; for telling it like it was, but with a twist.
I wandered out into Richmond with fresh eyes, looking out at the castle on top of the hill. The streets – called ‘Wynds’ – did indeed wind round the mount, like the stripes of a helter-skelter. It was a topsy-turvy place with an upside-down logic, more like a Tuscan hill-town than the staid Yorkshire municipalities that lay further south on the plains. No wonder James Herriot described it as ‘the most romantic and charming town in the country’. And yes, that’s country, not county.
How strange it must have been for the young Charles Dodgson to arrive here at twelve and a half as a boarder at Richmond Grammar School. Until then, he had lived with his parents in the rector’s house in Croft, seven miles away – far enough to need to be a boarder. The house in Croft had been unusual in that a previous owner had planted exotic species in the garden, like specimen trees from the Himalaya and a cactus that flowered for one night only. It made for a wonderful space for Charles and his ten brothers and sisters to make up their games; to play croquet with imaginary flamingos.
And so when he came to Richmond in 1844, he inevitably suffered a little from loneliness and the strangeness of a new school. The stammer, or ‘hesitation’, as he called it, can’t have helped. Victorian schoolboys were not a forgiving bunch.
In his letters home, the young Charles sounded as anxious as the White Rabbit. He complained on arrival that the headmaster’s wife had confiscated half his clothes as being inappropriate. He had three main worries: that he had lost his toothbrush; that his blotting paper had gone missing, perhaps taken by someone else; and that he couldn’t find his shoehorn. In one letter he wrote, ‘I have not got any warm gloves, but must do so soon.’ Twenty years afterwards, the White Rabbit was still ordering Alice to fetch him some when he confuses her for the maid.
Moreover, his Tweedledum and Tweedledee schoolfellows in their boater hats were, to say the least, unkind:
The boys proposed to play at King of the Cobblers and asked me if I would be King, to which I agreed; then they made me sit down and sat (on the ground) in a circle round me, and told me to say ‘go to work’. Which I said, and they immediately began kicking me and knocking me on all sides … The chief games here are football, wrestling, leapfrog and fighting.
It is interesting that this letter was addressed not to his parents, but to his sisters. He was already adopting that tone of complicit, sardonic intelligence which was to become so characteristic of Alice.
I went to see Swale House where he lived with his schoolfellows, at the bottom of the lane that falls away from the marketplace and now takes most of its traffic: a handsome house, with a large extension at the back that the enlightened Tate family, who were headmasters for several generations, had built for their charges.
James Tate quickly realised that the young Dodgson was something of a prodigy. ‘He has,’ he wrote in a letter to Charles’s parents, ‘a very uncommon share of genius.’ Moreover, he was ‘a gentle, intelligent and well-conducted boy’.
Even though he left to go to Rugby School, Charles Dodgson kept in touch with James Tate and his children for many years and often returned to Richmond as a touchstone. When staying with his own family in Croft, he would walk there and back in a day – some fourteen miles, not bad for a man who is usually thought of as an Oxford aesthete.
How much better to re-imagine him as a Yorkshire writer: to think of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland being read, not by some mellifluous received-pronunciation RADA accent, but by Alan Bennett. With the Cheshire Cat voiced in a guest appearance by Geoffrey Boycott. And Yorkshire Tea being poured by the Mad Hatter.
Near the headmaster’s house, a small ivy-covered plaque in the church graveyard commemorated the site of Charles Dodgson’s original school, which had moved several times over the centuries since Dodgson was there. But what had remained in the same place was the Georgian Theatre Royal, which was still up and running in the last heyday of Regency Richmond, and which Dodgson almost certainly attended. It had been restored and was still a working theatre, lying just off the marketplace.
This again was a miniature world. The stage was tiny and so was the auditorium. There was a fashion for ladies to conceal wooden blocks under their wigs to raise them higher on their heads, particularly when dressing up for a night at the theatre. I liked to think of the schoolboy Dodgson craning over these elaborately coiffured wigs; or peering down through the candelabra from the cheap shilling seats above.
Performances would certainly have been raucous. So-called ‘kicking boards’ lined the stalls, and were used with vigour if the audience disapproved or got bored. And given that they quite often showed two plays together on the same night as a double bill – a serious Shakespeare play like Hamlet might be followed by a lighter Restoration comedy – there would have been plenty of time for buttocks to get restless on the hard wooden seats. Moreover, the army garrison at nearby Catterick provided plenty of rowdy soldiers looking for entertainment.
A lady called Glen kindly showed me round both the theatre and the back of the stage, ‘as I’ve nothing better to do’. She was blonde and buxom, in an agreeable Beryl Cook sort of way, and had a strong Yorkshire accent. We stopped at a portrait of the founding spirit of the theatre, the wonderfully named Tryphosa Brockell. After getting through two husbands who acted with her in the company – ‘so you could say she was a bit of a black widow, was Tryphosa,’ said Glen – she married her third and final husband, Samuel Butler, who was also in the company. At twenty-six, Samuel was almost twenty years younger than her: ‘so really’ – no one says ‘really’ as well as they do in Yorkshire – ‘really,’ said Glen, ‘he was a toy-boy for her.’
Tryphosa and Samuel built up a thriving repertory theatre that toured right across the North and performed at theatres from Whitby to Harrowgate; the theatre at Richmond is the only one that survives. The programme they put on was surprisingly radical. The opening night in Richmond in 1788 had one play about freedom for slaves, some fifty years ahead of its time – and another about giving votes to women, a good 150 years ahead of its time.
Samuel was the actor-manager, and while clearly an able manager who built up a thriving company with Tryphosa, his reputation as an actor was less secure. He inspired widespread ridicule by performing as Hamlet with a strong Yorkshire accent; then, as now, more problematic than it really ought to be.
It is perhaps unfortunate that he chose as the epitaph for his gravestone these lines from Macbeth: ‘A poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more.’
The young Edmund Kean was far more successful. The Marlon Brando of his day, who followed a far more naturalistic style of acting, he cut his teeth at the Richmond Theatre when he was only eighteen. Samuel Butler spotted his talent and sent him on a stagecoach to London.
But not before he had established a rip-roaring reputation in Richmond. As a wide-eyed Glen put it, ‘Now, he was an A-lister right from the start. Kept a tame lion in his drawing room. A big drinker. Chased after the ladies. He used to ride his horse up the street straight into the theatre. And you can see, it’s not a big lobby.
‘Not like the young male actors who come here today. They’re more herbivorous, if you know what I mean. They all wear those long scarves. More polite these days. I suppose they have to be if they want to get on.’
Old playbills lined the walls. Two things intrigued me. The first was that the entertainment was presented as mainly a musical concert, with plays attached. This, according to Glen, was to get around strict censorship laws which forbade showing plays outside London, in case they were satirical.
But more worrying was that none of the writers of the plays ever got a name-check. Not even Shakespeare. Just the play’s title and a long list of actors headed by Samuel Butler were given instead. It was like Hollywood. Writers were way, way down the pecking order when it came to promoting the product. I had no illusions that when coming to sell this book, Jethro as ‘the mule’ would get a far bigger billing and typeface than I would on the front cover. And would be front of stage in any photo. He had made it quite clear there was only one A-lister on this trip – and it wasn’t Jasper or me.
I rang my dad again.
‘Taking a mule across England? Really? Whatever for? Just one? Or are you taking a whole train of mules?’
For some reason, this last thought amused him. He gave his characteristic rich, warm laugh.
‘And when you finish, will you have to do it all over again? You could make a career of it.’
I didn’t think there was much of a future in becoming a full-time muleteer. And besides, Britain already had Jasper, if only on loan from Ireland. But Dad’s enthusiasm was encouraging.
We spent several days in Richmond to regroup and gather strength, while Jethro enjoyed the fine facilities in his country-house stabling. Jasper and I were staying with a kind friend whose dog needed considerable exercise, so over the many days that followed I had the chance to wander the streets and talk to people.
I soon discovered that, along with its Georgian charm and impossibly picturesque setting of castle and river, as painted by Turner, there was a darker side to Richmond. The lamps along the castle walkway had been vandalised. Locals told me about an epic pub fight involving around thirty people which had taken place outside the Buck the previous Christmas. One of the guys at the petrol-station counter had a black eye after remonstrating with a customer who had tried to do a runner.
In the sandwich shop, Jefferson’s, I got chatting to the ebullient owner Gary while he was selling me a sausage roll with black pudding (and giving me an extra one for free, as he could tell I was an enthusiast). He told me that ‘although it might seem a contradiction in terms, there’s a thriving food bank in Richmond’. Decent jobs were scarce – indeed ‘were like hens’ teeth’.
Along with the more genteel establishments, the delis, cafés and gift shops, there were tattoo parlours and cheap booze outlets. I could see from some of the clothes people wore they were having to get by on not very much; nor were they helped by the inflated house prices, pushed up by the retirees drawn to such a chocolate box town. Even in Charles Dodgson’s time, it had been a fashionable place for widows to eke out their pensions.
To a certain extent, Richmond had often been a little like this. Celia Fiennes, one of our earliest and most astute travel writers, commented back in 1698 that ‘it looks like a sad, shattered town and fallen much to decay and like a disregarded place’. Even Turner, when he visited in the 1820s during its Regency heyday, was criticised for including the overflowing tanneries and breweries beside the river in his paintings, along with the more sublime aspects of the scene.
The poorer parts of resort towns are often overlooked. Bath has some noticeably rough areas, while the Blackbird Leys estate on the outskirts of Oxford is a world away from the dreaming spires.
But even if there was a layer of grime under the rim of the silver plate, it was hard not to be seduced by Richmond: by the cobbled street of Newbiggin bestriding the top of the hill with such wide elegance; by the Wynds uncurling around the town; and most of all by the fine cobbled marketplace (‘don’t ever call it a “square”,’ Gary had told me, ‘because it isn’t one’), the largest in England, with its obelisk and church and, of course, towering over proceedings, the handsome Norman castle.
Jethro made it quite clear he thought it foolish and misguided for us to continue our journey. He was living in clover. Fine stables at his country house, plenty of pasture, and admiring mares looking at him over the fence, whinnying appreciatively. He had amused himself by sending my wife Irena a postcard: ‘Hugh tells me that you can sometimes be a bit grumpy and stubborn like me, but I think he’s wrong and we’re both misunderstood?’
Now he gave me the enquiring look that I was beginning to know well. It meant, ‘I’m more intelligent than you. I just can’t always put it into words.’ Although when he saw me with the head collar, he knew we were going to move on, come what may. Meanwhile Jasper was doing his own thing elsewhere for this stretch of the journey; as it was, I felt guilty he had been helping me so much.
Not long after Jethro and I headed east from Richmond, we came to the ruined remains of Easby Abbey. Grand and imposing, these large buildings stood as ‘bare ruined choirs where once the sweet birds sang’. English Heritage had not imposed the usual apparatus of gift shops, or for that matter charges, so they lay open to travellers like us, with a field nearby in which, to Jethro’s pleasure, horses roamed.
We had already passed such desolate reminders of the dissolution of the monasteries before – at Shap, for instance, in the Lake District. And I was well used to the great beached carcasses of monastic life at Tintern Abbey and Malmesbury in the South. Yet there was something peculiarly melancholic about Easby.
I did not feel much sympathy for those monks who had spent centuries living off the fat of the land and whose excesses were well, if zealously, documented by Cromwell and Cranmer. The banqueting hall looked solid and substantial; although of course some monks had also been deeply devout, and deserving of pity when the waves of Henry VIII’s wrath and greed had come crashing down.
But I thought more about the parishioners, particularly in the North and here in Richmondshire, who had lost their lives trying to defend monasteries such as this Abbey of St Agatha at Easby. Who had risen in their hundreds of thousands for the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536.
‘Rather than our house in St Agatha should go down, we shall all die,’ went the local proclamation.
And it was easy to imagine those parishioners. Because in the parish church of Easby, which stood intact beside the ruined abbey, some remarkable early frescoes had been restored in the chancel only a few years previously. Originally painted directly onto the wet plaster, they had been concealed with whitewash during the Restoration.
The frescoes depicted traditional Christian scenes like the Annunciation and the Nativity vision of the shepherds. However, they did so with a local cast. The shepherds wore the loose medieval smocks and cowls characteristic of Tudor England. And their faces had a startling veracity which suggested they had been drawn from local models. The recent restoration – done as a commendable project for the new millennium by English Heritage – had made those faces sing out again from the usual anonymity of history.
The pilgrims from Richmond and elsewhere in the North were drawn from such people. They sang as they marched south behind the banner of St Cuthbert. Trustingly, they had sworn allegiance not only to the Holy Church but to their king, who they felt must surely have been led astray by his advisers.
Henry VIII repaid this loyalty by massacring them. The gallows of the North were heavy with their bodies. Although those marching on the Pilgrimage of Grace were too strong to confront militarily, he was able to weaken the impetus of the rebellion by playing on their divided allegiances. And within eight years, all the monasteries and convents in England and Wales had been dissolved anyway. They had died in vain.
Henry described it as ‘a tragedy’. When he did so, he was not thinking of the deaths of the humble peasant pilgrims or indeed the monks who he also put to the sword. He was thinking of the decline of the royal houses of the North like the Percys of Northumberland, whose fortune and influence were thereby diminished. Not of the bodies of the poor that the widows of Richmondshire had to cut down from the gibbets.
I had deliberately timed the departure from Richmond to arrive at Catterick Races when a meeting was being held. What I had not been able to predict was the brilliant sunshine. The racecourse was bathed in colour, even though it was almost the last race of the year. It was a fabulous scene, like one of Raoul Dufy’s famous paintings at Deauville: the jockeys in their colours leading the horses round before the weighing-in; the good burghers of Yorkshire in their tweeds and dashing yellow shoes (the gentlemen), and a smattering of fine hats and racing-cut jackets (the ladies).
I’ve always enjoyed the races, although as an occasional visitor only. When I was younger, my idea of a perfect day was to be at a racecourse with a pretty girl and plenty of other friends, some drinks and, preferably, some winnings, although I rarely managed to pick a winner.
Jethro clearly could not come inside even though the Coast-to-Coast path passed a stone’s throw from the racetrack. I would have liked to have shown him how fast a thoroughbred horse can motor; it might have motivated him for the flat section we now had ahead of us beyond Catterick. Although I reassured Jethro he shouldn’t get jealous. A thoroughbred horse would have been useless for crossing England. That was a job for the equine equivalent of a mountain bike, not a Tour de France racer.
I did walk the course beforehand, both to see if the going was firm – although this would make little difference to my bets, which were usually made on the basis of an amusing name, the jockey’s colours or appealing odds – and to see the lake at the centre of the racecourse. Someone had told me that it entertained a surprising array of wildlife, and it was true: I saw a pair of nesting swans on the little island and, along with the heron gulls, some dazzling white egrets living in splendid isolation from the world.
Egrets are some of my favourite visitors to these shores, not least because they have only started arriving in my lifetime. Impossibly white and elegant, they are the supermodels of the wading world, striding with impossibly long legs down the catwalk of any shore. Apart from a dozen horses thundering by every two weeks, no intruders or stalkers could disturb them here.
Just alongside the racetrack, they were working to widen the A1. This would not have been of particular interest if they hadn’t in the process uncovered a staggering number of Roman artefacts: some 200,000, according to the archaeologists who had put on a temporary display. The A1 follows the line of the old Roman Dere Street – and then, just as today, a large army camp was stationed nearby. What fascinated me was the evidence of how the Roman legionaries whiled away their time. There were plenty of oyster shells and decorative horse ornaments for the races that even 2,000 years ago were already being held – and, the thing that amused me most, some dice that were loaded. Now that was one way to win a bet.
By the time I got back, the first race was about to begin. I always like the rough and ready mix of a small course. Catterick was by no means a fashionable, or for that matter large, meet; the starts had to suffer the occasional indignity of being delayed for the TV schedules if a bigger race was taking place elsewhere. But it was certainly one of the busiest in the country: twenty-eight fixtures a year put it second only to Doncaster.
There were thin, wiry men in trilbies, chain-smoking and clutching race cards on which vital information had been scribbled; a clutch of larger beer-drinking builders, for whom this was a bar with racecourse attached; and a solitary small woman wearing an old-fashioned 1920s flapper hat in grey felt, who peered anxiously through her binoculars as the first race began.
I overheard a conversation beside me on the stands between two men who had not seen each other for some time. They were both in their sixties, I reckoned, and talked in slow, deliberate Yorkshire accents.
Man One: ‘On Friday, I went to see a doctor about ’prostate. He gave me ’pill to get my testosterone levels down.’
(He pronounced ‘testosterone’ to rhyme with ‘macaroni’.)
Man Two: ‘I thought they were down anyway! And at your age you should count yourself lucky to have any testosterone at all.’
Man One: ‘Well, they did gall bladder first. Then they did ’prostate. And I’ve got polyps.’
Man Two: ‘Polyps! Oh I know all about polyps. Blud-y polyps! Last blood test before I went for my bowels, t’ nurse said, “You’re a regular little polyp-factory, you are.”’
Man One: ‘A “polyp-factory”. I suppose I’ve been called worse than that!’
There was a pause for consideration and a sip of beer, before he continued.
‘But I tell you what, I’ve got problems with ’legs as well. To do with my varicose veins. They’ve diagnosed something called thrombophlebitis.’
Man Two: ‘Yer what?’
Man One (with some pride): ‘“Throm-boph-leb-itis”. It’s affecting both legs. Left leg worse than right. By some way. I shouldn’t really be standing on it now. But what am I supposed to do? Just stand on one leg like a blud-y flamingo!?’
It was the sort of conversation that left me needing a drink. Particularly as Mexican Mick had not lived up to the promise of his name and had come in towards the end of the pack.
At the racecourse bar, a couple were fussing over their race card, and I got talking to them as I waited to order. Both were strikingly tall. They were Scottish and, it turned out, owned one of the horses. The woman was nervous and excited.
‘We’ve come down from Scotland. He’s our first thoroughbred horse and he’s only been in two races before.’
‘But,’ added her husband, ‘he won the first and did well in the second. There was a £14,000 prize for coming first. And winning that first race quadrupled his value. So, it’s been good business. He’s in terrific form at the moment.’
They were having a drink before going to see their horse in the owners’ enclosure. After that run of luck, I was surprised they weren’t drinking champagne.
‘Originally, we wanted a horse for the jumping,’ said the wife. ‘But we’ve gone over to the dark side.’
I looked questioningly.
‘Flat racing,’ and she laughed.
The husband nudged his wife. Their horse was being led into the enclosure. It looked calm and composed.
Only five horses were in the next race. Their horse was the favourite. Surely, I thought, even with my notorious bad luck, I should have a good chance with an each-way bet. Particularly with an insider tip-off. If his form was that good. Although as the odds were short, it would only be worth doing with a reasonably large stake.
The race track was left-handed, sharp and undulating, just over a mile round, with a three-furlong run-in. I stood in the sunlight at the top of the stand and used my bird-watching binoculars to watch the horses as they shimmered round in a brilliant line against the horizon, the jockey’s colours and silks flashing green and purple, turquoise with a star and sapphire blue. I remembered Siegfried Sassoon’s phrase about a horse that had won a race: ‘He had become the equine equivalent of divinity.’ The racecourse served a remarkably fine rosé, and a few glasses of that had warmed both my spirits and my hopes.
The commentator on the PA was building up to the customary crescendo as he galloped with the horses into the final straight. One phrase penetrated my well-chambré’d mind: ‘… and right at the rear, the favourite seems to be showing very little interest in proceedings’.
It was time for a reality check: to head back to the much more reliable Jethro and start crossing the Vale of Mowbray – not so much flat racing as flat plodding. But I knew that we would shortly be coming to a memorial to a most remarkable story.