Silks Read online

  The blue and white hooped colours flashed past the post to win by a head in a tight finish. Steve Mitchell had closed the gap on Barlow and Clemens with one more win.

  I went back into the jockeys’ inner sanctum to begin my mental preparation for the fifth race. I had discovered that I increasingly needed to get myself into the right frame of mind. If I wasn’t properly prepared, the whole thing would seemingly pass me by, and be over before I was even ready for it to start. As I knew that my racing days were numbered, I didn’t want to waste any of them.

  I sat on the bench that ran all round the room, and went through again in my head where I wanted to be as the tapes went up, where I would be as we approached the first fence and where I hoped to be as we approached the last. Of course, in my mind’s eye we would win the race and my apprehension would turn to joy. And that wouldn’t be all that unexpected. My bay gelding and I would start as favourite. His win in the Foxhunters at the Cheltenham Festival in March would make sure of that.

  Steve Mitchell came waltzing back into the changing room with a grin on his face wider than the eight-lane highway down the road.

  ‘What about that then, Perry?’ he said, slapping me on the back, bringing me out of my trance. ‘Bloody marvellous. And I beat that bastard Barlow. You should have seen his face. Furious, he was.’ He laughed expansively. ‘Serves him bloody well right.’

  ‘What for?’ I asked innocently.

  He stood still for a moment and looked at me inquisitively. ‘For being a bastard,’ he said, and turned away towards his peg.

  ‘And is he?’ I asked his back.

  He turned round to face me. ‘Is he what?’

  ‘A bastard.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘You’re a funny bloke, Perry,’ he said, irritated. ‘What bloody difference does it make whether he’s a real bastard or not.’

  I was beginning to wish I hadn’t got into this conversation. Being a barrister didn’t always help one to make friends.

  ‘Well done anyway,’ I said to him, but the moment had passed and he just waved a dismissive hand and turned his back on me once again.

  ‘Jockeys!’ An official put his head round the changing-room door and called the group of nineteen of us amateurs to the parade ring.

  My heart rate rose a notch. It always did. Adrenalin pumped through my veins and I positively jumped up and dived through the doorway. No superstitious last one out of the changing room for me, I wanted to savour every moment. It felt like my feet were hardly touching the ground.

  I adored this feeling. This is why I loved to ride in races. This was my fix, my drug. It was arguably less safe than sniffing cocaine and certainly more expensive, but it was a need in me, a compulsion, an addiction. Thoughts of heavy falls, of mortal danger, of broken bones and bruised bodies were banished simply by the thrill and the anticipation of the coming race. Such was the feeling on every occasion, undiminished by time and familiarity. I often told myself that I would hang up my saddle for good only when that emotion ceased to accompany the official’s call for ‘jockeys’.

  I made it to the parade ring without floating away altogether and stood excited on the tightly mowed grass with my trainer, Paul Newington.

  When I acquired my first horse some fifteen years ago, Paul had been thought of as the ‘bright young up-and-coming trainer’ in the sport. Now he was considered to be the man who never quite fulfilled his potential. He was originally from Yorkshire but had moved south in his late twenties, headhunted to take over from one of the grand old men of racing who had been forced into retirement by illness. Far from being up-and-coming, he was now in danger of becoming down-and-going, struggling to fill his expansive training establishment in Great Milton, just to the east of Oxford.

  But I liked him, and my own experience of his skills had been nothing but positive. Over the years he had bought for me a succession of sound hunter-chasers that had carried me, for the most part, safely over hundreds of miles and thousands of fences. Mostly they had been steady rather than spectacular, but that had been my brief to him when buying. I wanted to be in one piece more than I wanted to win.

  ‘I think you should beat this lot,’ Paul said, loosely waving a hand at the other groups in the parade ring. ‘Fairly jumping out of his skin, he is.’

  I didn’t like being expected to win. Even when defending in court I was generally pessimistic about my clients’ chances. That way, winning was unexpected and joyful while losing wasn’t too much of a disappointment.

  ‘Hope so,’ I replied. My apprehension grew as an official rang the bell and called for the jockeys to get mounted.

  Paul gave me a leg-up onto my current pride and joy. Sandeman was the best horse I had ever owned by a long way. Paul had bought him for me as an eight-year-old with a mixed history of fairly moderate results in hurdle races. Paul had reckoned that Sandeman was too big a horse to run over hurdles and that he would be much better as a chaser and he had been right. The horse had quickly learned the skill of jumping the bigger obstacles and was soon shooting up the handicap. So far we had won eight races together and he had won five others without me in the saddle, including that victory in the Foxhunter Chase at Cheltenham.

  This was his first run since the summer layoff. He would be thirteen on the first of January and, consequently, he was close to the twilight of his career. Paul and I had planned that he would race just twice before the Cheltenham Festival, before what we hoped would be a repeat victory in the Foxhunters.

  I had first been introduced to steeplechase racing by my uncle Bill when I was twelve. Uncle Bill was my mother’s younger brother and he was still in his early twenties when he had been delegated to take me out for the day and keep me out of mischief. I had been staying with him and his parents, my grandparents, while my own mother and father were away together on holiday in South America.

  I had clambered eagerly into the passenger seat of his beloved open-topped MG Midget and we had set out for the south coast and the planned day at Worthing in West Sussex.

  Unbeknown to me, or to his somewhat austere parents, Uncle Bill had no intention of spending the day dragging his young nephew across Worthing’s steep pebble beach or along its elegant Victorian pier so I could be entertained by the amusement arcades. Instead he drove us about fifteen miles further to the west to Fontwell Park racecourse, and my abiding passion for jump racing was born.

  At almost every British racecourse it is possible for the spectators to stand next to a fence, to experience the thrill of being so close up as half-ton horses soar over and through the tightly bound birch, to hear the horses’ hooves thumping the turf, to feel the earth tremble, and to sense the excitement of being part of the race. But at Fontwell the steeplechase course is a figure of eight and one can run between the jumps that are near to the cross-over point and be close to the action twice on each circuit, six times in all during a three-mile chase.

  Uncle Bill and I spent much of the afternoon running across the grass from fence to fence, and by the end of the day I knew for certain that I wanted to be one of those brave young men in their bright coloured silks fearlessly kicking and urging his mount into the air at thirty miles an hour with hope in his heart, trusting that the spindly legs of the Thoroughbred racehorse beneath him would save them both from crashing to the ground on the other side.

  Such was my conviction that I could think of nothing else for weeks and I begged my uncle to take me with him to the races whenever I could get away from more mundane things like school and studying.

  I enrolled at a local riding stables and soon mastered the art, not of dressage as they would have preferred, but of riding at speed over jumps. My teacher tried in vain to get me to sit upright in the saddle with my heels down. However, I was determined to stand in the stirrups crouching over the animal’s withers just as I had seen the jockeys do.

  By the time I was seventeen and learning to drive a car, I could navigate my way around the country not by the positions of
the major cities but by the locations of the racecourses. Maybe I couldn’t find my way to Birmingham, or to Manchester or to Leeds, but I knew unerringly the quickest route from Cheltenham to Bangor-on-Dee, or from Market Rasen to Aintree.

  Sadly, by then I had come to terms with the fact that I was never going to earn my living from race riding. For a start, despite my best efforts in refusing my school dinners, I had grown too tall and was already showing signs of becoming too heavy to be a professional jockey. Coupled with that was an apparent gift for academic success, and the fact that my future career in the law had been planned out to the nth degree by my father. He had decided that I would follow him to his old college at London University, then, like him, to the College of Law in Guildford and, finally, into the same firm of high-street solicitors that he himself had joined some thirty years previously. I would spend my life, like his, conveyancing property from seller to buyer, drawing up last wills and testaments, and untying the knots of failed marriages in south-west London suburbia. The promised boredom of it all had filled me with horror.

  I had been twenty-one and in my third year of a Bachelor of Laws degree at UCL when my darling mother had finally lost her long battle against leukaemia. Her death wasn’t a surprise to me, in fact she had lived far longer than any of the family had expected, but, perhaps for the first time, it brought home to me the fallibility and transitory nature of the human state. She died on her forty-ninth birthday. There had been no cutting of cake with blown-out candles, no singing of ‘Happy Birthday to You’. Just despair and tears. Lots and lots of tears.

  The experience made me resolve to do what I really wanted and not what everyone else expected of me. Life, I suddenly decided, was too short to waste.

  I had duly completed my degree, as it had somehow seemed a mistake to give it all up at such a late stage, but I had absolutely no intention of becoming a solicitor like my father. I had written to the College of Law to withdraw my application for the Legal Practice Course, the next step on the solicitors’ ladder, and, much to my remaining parent’s horror and anger, had arranged instead to go to Lambourn as unpaid assistant and amateur jockey with a mid-ranking racehorse trainer.

  ‘But how will you afford to live?’ my father had demanded in exasperation.

  ‘I will use the legacy that Mum left me,’ I’d replied.

  ‘But…,’ he had blustered. ‘That was meant to be for the down payment on a house.’

  ‘She didn’t say so in her will,’ I had said rather tactlessly, sending my father into a tirade about how the young these days had no sense of responsibility. This was not an uncommon rant in our household, and I was well used to ignoring it.

  So I had graduated in June and gone to Lambourn in July, and had used my mother’s legacy not only to pay my living expenses but also to acquire a seven-year-old bay gelding that I could ride in races, having correctly supposed that I was unlikely to get any rides on anyone else’s horses.

  I didn’t tell my father.

  August had mostly been spent getting fit. Each morning I would ride my horse in the stable string to the gallops on the hills above the village and then, each afternoon, I would run the same route on foot. By mid September both horse and jockey were showing signs of being ready for the racecourse.

  Quite by chance, or was it fate, my first ride in a proper race had been at Fontwell in early October that year. The whole experience had seemed to pass me by in a blur with everything happening at once. Such was my naivety and nervousness that I nearly forgot to weigh out, had been unprepared and badly left at the start, had struggled for a full circuit to get back to the other runners before fading badly due to my own lack of stamina towards the end. We had finished eleventh out of thirteen, and one of the two I had beaten only because he had fallen in front of me at the last. It had not been an auspicious beginning. However the trainer had seemed relatively satisfied.

  ‘At least you didn’t fall off,’ he had said on our way home in his car.

  I had taken it as a compliment.

  My horse and I had raced together five more times that year and on each occasion we had fared slightly better than the time before, finishing a close second in an amateur riders’ steeplechase at Towcester races the week before Christmas.

  By the following March I had ridden over fences a total of nine times and I had also had my first racing fall, at Stratford. However, it had been my ego that had been more bruised than my body. My horse and I had been well in front with just one fence left to negotiate when the excitement of the moment had become too much for me and I had made a complete hash of it, asking my mount for a mighty leap while he had decided to put in an extra stride. The result was that we had ploughed through the top of the fence, ending up in a crumpled heap on the ground watching ruefully as the others had sailed past us to the finish.

  In spite of this disaster, and even though I had not yet ridden a winner, I still loved the excitement of the actual races, but I had begun to be rather bored by the time between them. I was missing the intellectual stimulation that I had so enjoyed during my time at university. And my mother’s legacy had started to show major signs of exhaustion. It was time to put my fantasy back in its box and earn myself a living. But as what? I remained steadfast in my aversion to being a solicitor, but what else could I do with my law degree?

  Not all lawyers are solicitors, I remembered one of my tutors saying during my first weeks at university. There are barristers as well.

  To someone who was expecting, and expected, to become a general practice high-street solicitor, the world of the barrister was mysterious and unknown. My choice of optional study topics in my degree had concentrated on those areas I could mostly expect to encounter: conveyancing, family, employment and contract law. I had tended to avoid advocacy, criminal law and jurisprudence as much as possible.

  I had researched the differences between barristers and solicitors in the local library in Hungerford and had learned that barristers were advocates, standing up and arguing, while solicitors generally did the legal paperwork in the background. Barristers tended to spar verbally across courtrooms with other barristers, while solicitors drew up contracts and litigation alone in quiet offices.

  All of a sudden the prospect of becoming a stand-up-and-argue barrister had excited me hugely and I had eagerly applied for a return to legal matters.

  So here I was some fourteen years later, well established in the world of horsehair wigs, silk gowns and courtroom protocol, but still trying to master this racing lark.

  ‘Jockeys! Walk in.’ The starter’s call brought me back to the matter in hand. How careless, I thought, to be daydreaming at such a time. Concentrate! I told myself sharply.

  The nineteen of us walked up slowly in a straggly line, the starter pushed the lever, the tape flew up and we were off. Not that it was easy to tell as no one seemed keen to make the running. The pack slowly went from walk to trot, and then to canter as the race began in almost sedentary style.

  The three-mile start at Sandown is on the side of the course just after the bend at the end of the home straight, so the horses have to complete almost two full circuits jumping a total of twenty-two fences. The first, which comes up very soon after the start, looks fairly innocuous but has caught out many an amateur and professional rider in its time. The landing side is some way below the take-off point and the drop tends to pitch horses forward onto their noses. The slow initial pace of this race, however, gave even the most inexperienced jockey, riding the world’s worst jumper, time to haul on the reins to keep the animal’s head up. So all nineteen runners were still standing as the pace picked up and we turned right-handed into the back straight to face the most famous seven-fence combination in steeplechasing. Two plain fences and an open-ditch fairly close together, then a slight gap to the water-jump, then the famous Railway fences – three plain fences very close together, closer than any others in British racing. It is always said that if you jump the first one well then all will be fine, but m
ake a hash of the first and then horse and rider will be lucky to get to the far end intact.

  Three miles is a long way, especially in November mud after a wet autumn, and none of us was making the mistake of going too fast too early. Consequently all nineteen runners were still standing and fairly closely bunched as we swung out of the back straight and round the long curve to the Pond fence and then up in front of the watching crowds for the first time.

  The thing that struck me most when I started riding in races was the apparent isolation in which the participants find themselves. There may be thousands and thousands of eager gamblers in the grandstands, each shouting on their choices, but, for all the jockeys can tell, the stands may as well be empty and deserted. The sound of horses’ hooves striking the turf, the same sound that had so excited me as a boy that first day at Fontwell Park, was the main noise that filled the senses. And obviously, unlike for the stationary spectator for whom it comes and goes, the noise travels along with the horses. There are other sounds too: the slap of the reins or whip, the clicking together of hooves, the shouts of the jockeys and the clatter of hoof or horseflesh on birch and wood as the animals brush through the top few inches of each fence. All of these together make the race a noisy place to be, and they exclude any utterances from outside this bubble. No word of encouragement can penetrate, not a single phrase of commentary can enter. Quite often, afterwards, the jockeys are the least informed about the triumphs and disasters of others. If it occurs behind them, they will have no idea that, say, the red-hot favourite has fallen, or a loose horse has caused mayhem in the pack. Unlike Formula 1 there are no team radios or pit-boards to inform and enlighten.

  The pace quickened again noticeably as we turned away from the stands and went downhill past our starting point. The race was suddenly on in earnest.

  Sandeman and I had been keeping to the shortest way round, hugging the inside rail, following the leading trio by a couple of lengths or so. Now, the horse immediately ahead of me began to tire slightly and I was concerned that I would be forced to slow with him as, with others alongside me, I had nowhere to go.