Lester: The Official Biography Read online

  Lester's childhood, as far as his family went, was rooted in a secure, caring, hardworking background. He describes his childhood as having been happy; which is to say not that he was in any way pampered, but that he received exactly the sort and amount of affection which suited him best. From his mother, he got no-nonsense love and a great deal of worldly level-headed advice. From his father, instruction from an early age in the finer points of horsemanship and an intense and lasting father-son devotion.

  What the parents had to work on was raw material imbued with talent, tenacity and intelligence, and if their imprint still shows on the finished article, one can hardly say they did a bad job.

  The infant Lester was variously described as a sweet little boy and a proper little devil, which sounds totally normal. His most irritating habit as a toddler was to sit on the floor with his back to people and not answer when he was spoken to. He frequently didn't do what he was told, and he didn't like strangers.

  At quite a young age he had an operation for adenoids, as it was considered that they were blocking the back of his nose and hindering his speech. Not a great deal was made of his excessively nasal intonation as, in fact, his father spoke in much the same way, though to a lesser extent. Nor was much weight given to the fact that he spoke seldom because, when he did speak, his command of words was suitable for his age. Out with the adenoids, it was thought, and hey presto.

  Out came the adenoids and Lester went on precisely as before. After a while, when he was about four, a further and more radical adenoid operation was carried out, this time removing tonsils as well. And it was after this that the specialist treating him asked Iris and Keith to go and see him, and to bring their son. They went and talked in his consulting room, with Lester playing quietly on the floor.

  "I think," said the ear-nose-and-throat man, "that your son is deaf."

  The parents were astounded and disbelieving. "He can't be," they said. "He hears what we say. He answers us."

  "He hears a little," they were told, "but he's very bright, and he lip-reads."

  Iris and Keith still didn't believe him.

  "I'll show you," the doctor said. He got Lester to stand at his knee, and asked him a simple question. Lester answered without hesitation. "He's not deaf," Keith asserted.

  The doctor shook his head, picked up a large sheet of paper and held it in front of his mouth so that Lester could see only his eyes looking over the top. He asked Lester another question, just as simple. Lester gave no sign at all of having heard. The doctor put down the paper and asked the same question again. Lester answered at once.

  This demonstration, once or twice repeated with exactly the same results, reluctantly convinced the Piggotts. They cast their minds back and found explanations for so much behaviour that they had considered just "Lester's way". The refusal to answer when he had his back to people: he didn't know they wanted an answer unless he saw them speak. The impedimented speech: he didn't know how words ought to sound.

  He didn't obey ... when he couldn't hear the instructions; and the withdrawal from strangers was because he found their lips difficult to read.

  "And it explained," Keith said, "a habit he had of going right up close to the wireless and pressing his ear against it. He did it often ... but we never thought it was because he couldn't hear properly."

  Tests were made. Lester's ears proved to be receptive to low-frequency sounds but progressively insensitive higher up the scale. He has the sort of hearing which lets in whispers and blots out screams. He was fitted with a hearing aid, but he wouldn't wear it. He simply took it off and left it lying about, and all efforts to persuade him ended in failure. Lester, said his mother resignedly, never did what he didn't want to.

  He continued to lip-read and to speak indistinctly and seemed perfectly happy with things as they were.

  Lester's ability to lip-read grew like an extra sense at such an early age that not only his parents but countless others afterwards didn't realise he couldn't hear much of what they said. He says himself that it's no disadvantage as if he is bored with a conversation he doesn't have to listen, and there's no doubt that his habit of switching off goes right back to birth.

  It is still no use expecting a Piggott answer if you speak to the back of his head. No use looking too far away from him while you speak. He hears chiefly with his eyes, prefers to talk to one person at a time, and has a tendency to look uncomprehending for long periods at receptions. On the other hand, when everything is quiet at night he can hear distant sounds, like owls hooting and trains running on rails three miles away; and he can hear quite well on the telephone, even on ordinary receivers not fitted with a volume-booster switch like his own at home.

  Lester himself is inclined to think his deafness resulted from falling on his head off a pony when he was six. He was knocked unconscious and suffered from concussion, and he believeswrongly-that this made him deaf. It's probable he thinks so because it must have been at about this time that he came to realise that his hearing was different from that of everyone else.

  The difficulty with hearing and the fact of his being an only child combined powerfully from the start to turn him inwards to himself. Add to this natural isolation a focus of interest, and you have all the ingredients of super-single-mindedness. He saw horses all around him: they were his father's job, his mother's interest, his family's tradition. The barrier of deafness kept most of the rest of the world away as if in the misty distance. The active young mind fed and filled and grew on talk of racing, and nothing much else seemed as real or as important.

  It wouldn't have been enough, of course, without one other decisive gift: the bonus that he was born with the build and balance of a natural athlete. As a child, his face was rounded and chubby and his body that of any normal boy. He was slight but not tiny for his age, nor in any obvious way physically remarkable, but he was endowed nonetheless with innate economy and grace of movement. He could run faster than any others of his age that he came across, and developed an early skill at any game he tried to play. At school, the retired soldier in charge of physical education, Sergeant-Major Glaser, spotted this flair when Lester was at least as young as seven, and encouraged him to run and to play cricket. When Lester was eleven, Glaser told him he could earn his living at any sport he cared to choose.

  Lester clearly remembers this first coach, but the old talent scout was fighting a losing 'battle: every day after school, Lester's single desire was to get on his bicycle and pedal home to the only really important activity in life, riding horses.

  The first school he attended was King Alfred's in Wantage, a sturdy old building on the side of the town nearest Letcombe Regis. Home and school were about two miles of leafy lanes apart with no main roads to cross, so that as soon as he could manage it, before he was six, he took himself to and from by bike. Even allowing for the fact that more was expected from war-time children by way of physical effort, it is evident that Lester's incredible stamina dated from a very early age. The road from Letcombe to Wantage is by no means flat.

  As might be expected, he did not excel academically. Quite probably he might have done if he had been inclined that way, but his whole cast of mind, apart from his difficulty in hearing the masters, was against it. He did enough school work to keep himself out of trouble and out of bottom place in class, and it is clear that his lack of academic progress was due to lack of interest, not of intellect. What he did want to learn, he learned fast and thoroughly, and first of all he wanted to read.

  He read everything to do with racing. Not a word of "Dickens and books like that".

  Nothing in the mainstream of the national literary heritage. Nothing about history, art, music or philosophy. Everything about racing. And literally everything he could lay his hands on, from ancient books of memoirs to the stop-press in the evening papers.

  His own antecedent, William Day, wrote two fascinating books of revelation about the early Victorian racing scene which make the modern Turf look like an antisep
tic nursery school. Those, and books like George Lambton's immortal Men and Horses I Have Known were what Lester devoured instead of Noddy. The habit of reading, once acquired, is impossible to shake off. Lester reckons he has now read almost every book ever published on the subject of racing, and finds reading his chief relaxation.

  Next after reading, he wanted to learn about figures. Not just twice-times-two, and certainly not cube roots and the square on the hypotenuse. He was not even inclined towards the mathematics of betting, in the way of the baby who was taught to count by his bookmaker father-"One, six-tofour, two . . ."

  Lester's figures were those to be found in the delicate salmon-pink pages of the Financial Times. Lester's "Pink 'Un" told him the winners on the Stock Market and summed up the prospects of fast movers in minerals and shipping. Lester by the age of thirteen knew his way round the Financial Times as familiarly as round Comic Cuts.

  Iris remembers a day when the bank manager came to call and tried to find a certain report he wished to discuss. Lester watched him turning the closely-printed pages unsuccessfully and began fidgetting with impatience. Finally, unable to stand the sight any longer, he snatched the paper out of the bank manager's hands and turned immediately to the page required.

  "He was quite small," Iris says. "The bank manager was astonished."

  Lester's interest in finance has been called everything from "shrewd" to "too mean to give you a dirty look". Under every stone on the Turf there are stories of how Lester avoids paying for anything if he can inveigle someone else into doing it, stories all trying to prove that, compared with Lester, Scrooge was a non-starter. Lester never pays, they say. Lester is always missing at hand-inpocket time. Lester gives you things, and then asks for the money.

  Lester, on the other hand, is demonstrably not a miser, because his parsimoniousness does not begin at home. He lives well, dresses well, and spends a lot of money on things he likes, and he always has. Towards his own family he is open-handedly generous, and when among long-time friends pays his share as a matter of course.

  According to Iris, his closeness as far as other people are concerned is her fault. "I detest spongers," she said. "When Lester was a young child, I knew so many jockeys who earned a lot and had nothing to show for it when they retired. There was one who lived at Cheltenham who had a beautiful house and everything of the best, but he didn't take care of his money. There were always hangers-on, letting him pay for everything. He ended up with nothing. No house, no money ... taking any odd-job, and when he was old, practically begging. I saw him once outside a racecourse, walking up and down in sandwich boards. It made me so angry. And there were others. One of them earned thousands and thousands, but he had no sense. He thought he ought always to pay for everyone because he earned more than they did.

  He would have five or six so-called friends with him most of the time, and he would pay all their hotel bills and so on ... They just took all they could get out of him and never suggested he should save for when he had to stop riding. So then, when he did stop, he hadn't put a great deal away. He'd earned enough to be comfortably off for the rest of his life but he'd wasted it all on bloodsuckers who deserted him at once, as soon as his money dried up. Well, I suppose Lester heard me talking about this a great deal, and certainly I did warn him over and over again not to let people take advantage of him, not to lavish his money on people who were only out for what they could get. I told him to save for being well-off when he was older. And I suppose that perhaps I did rather too good a job."

  Her ever persisting passion on this subject entirely explains Lester's evasiveness with cash. She gave him as a little boy not just casual advice on the subject once or twice, but fierce and often reiterated cautionary tales about the poverty awaiting victims of spongers.

  Lester grew up with a determination not to be "done" that has lasted all his fife and is as much an automatic part of his psychological make-up as looking before crossing the road. The people who have to pay up small sums after Lester has walked away think of each such act as a deliberate meanness directed towards them personally. They're wrong: Lester walks away from paying out of deep-seated subconscious mental habit. It doesn't seem mean to him, but merely normal and prudent.

  Occasionally he does play it awarely as a game, grinning fiendishly as he manoeuvres someone else into coughing up for the taxi. Occasionally, on the other hand, he will pay up cheerfully when outmanoeuvred by someone else; cheerfully, that is, when it is quite clear to both Lester and opponent that a game has been played.

  Back in his childhood, though, it was no game. He learned that a fool and his money were soon parted, and he didn't mean to be a fool.

  Life for all wartime children tended to be austere, and it is significant that at the start of hostilities Lester was two months short of four. From then until he was nearly ten, during his most impressionable years, he heard phrases like "make a sacrifice", "do without", and "there isn't any" used as regular everyday speech. Half the children in his class at school were refugees, evacuated from London. He saw no lighted windows after dark. He lived in a world where treats were rare, new clothes scarce, and petrol for pleasure not allowed. He saw no bananas, lemons or pineapples.

  Sweets were rationed to four ounces a week, and there was no ice cream. Everyone lived on a boring and restricted diet and put up with it more or less cheerfully. Lester, therefore, passed his childhood without lavish food and without resenting its absence, a basic training which was to stand him in very good stead.

  Of all the deprivations of his young years, he compensated as an adult for only one, developing a passion for ice cream. Any ice cream stall near the exit gate of a racecourse acted on him later like a magnet, and on a hot day, tired after riding, he couldn't resist this appeal. Give him ice cream anywhere anytime, and he disposes of it fast. "Mad for it," he says. "And I know it puts on weight, because I've weighed myself before and after eating it, and a plateful puts on a whole pound. American ice cream is best. They have forty-two varieties in those Howard Johnson restaurants."

  In most respects, his life followed a normal pattern. His parents took him most years for a holiday at the seaside to places like Selsey in Sussex and Devon, during which he acquired another lasting interest, swimming.

  To offset his aloneness at home, his mother occasionally asked other children to tea.

  Lester was usually pleased enough at the prospect of having others to play with, but halfway through the visit he would get bored and disappear, leaving his mother to do the entertaining. Walking away from boredom is something he has done all his life.

  He had few toys, from his own choice, and was not possessive of them. He was a naturally tidy child, highly organised and punctual. If he said he would do a thing at a certain time, he did it; and except when circumstances prevent it, he maintains this habit to this day. He was strong and healthy. He caught a few colds but cannot remember having had measles or other infectious diseases. He disliked the school food ("potatoes and milk and muck like that") and didn't eat it, which helped to keep him light. And one of his chief childish pleasures was stealing apples.

  A wholesome, well-regulated childhood in a straightforwardly sensible home. Sturdy foundations for a skyscraper.

  It was during the war years that his father taught him to ride. He had no other teacher, then or ever, except his own eyes, and hardly needed one, as the teacher he did have was patient, persistent and expert, and obviously did a good job.

  Keith at that time had rented a stable in Letcombe Regis from a man called Grimey Whitelaw, and was training a few horses on his own account. Racing continued on a small scale throughout the war, mostly with the object of maintaining the thoroughbred blood lines. The Derby was run at Newmarket, which was safer from bombs than Epsom, and a restricted number of other meetings, both Flat and National Hunt, took place. Keith rode in as few as ten races a year, a lean time to be a jockey, and although Lester went with him three or four times, he remembers seeing Keith race only onc
e. It was at Windsor in 1944, when Lester was eight. "One of those doodle-bugs came over just before the race started ... we were all lying on the ground, but it went over and came down towards London." The flying bomb made an impression, but not the actual race.

  From Lester's point of view, Keith was a kind teacher, insistent but not impatient.

  "He used to tell me all the time. Anything I did wrong, he used to put me right."

  Although he had ridden various other children's ponies from the age of two, the first he himself called his own was Brandy, a half-tamed creature from the New Forest who made an indelible impression on the whole family. Keith and Lester set off from Letcombe, with a car and trailer to fetch it from Fulke Walwyn who had a stable at East Ilsley, about ten miles away. Fulke had agreed to lease the pony to Keith for a fiver, but wouldn't sell it.

  On the outward journey, Lester suddenly saw the empty trailer passing the car in which he sat beside his father, and they both watched, mesmer ised, while it ran on ahead into a ditch. There it stuck, damaged and too heavy for them to shift, but rather than go home without Brandy, they drove on to East Ilsley and sent for a motor horsebox. The one which arrived had room for six full-grown racehorses, and it went solemnly to Letcombe containing one thirteen-hands pony.