Unbreakable
Page 26
The language barrier added to the strangeness of the trip. Collins recalls a series of incomprehensible pre-race briefings, and he initially felt that he was seen as a ‘degenerate capitalist’. But the locals were clearly impressed by Stephen’s Society, who was bigger than the other horses; and once the race began, they were all in it together. Collins – who had no idea that among the spectators was an old woman who had conquered these obstacles many times, in far more intimidating circumstances – began cautiously. But once Stephen’s Society had made it (just) over Taxis, both horse and rider began to relax and, gradually, worked their way up the field. There was a difficult moment when a loose horse forced Stephen’s Society out so wide that Collins had to bring him to a halt; but even then, after resuming in last place, the pair never looked uncomfortable. They regained the lost ground easily, the gelding’s stamina and jumping ability more than compensating for his lack of pace. They won by between eight and twelve lengths, depending on whose account you believe, and Collins was suddenly a local hero.
‘They were very friendly,’ remembers Collins. ‘They seemed particularly pleased that I wasn’t Russian.’ He won 100,000 crowns and a motorbike, but, this being the Cold War, was unable to get the money out of the country (and even in Czechoslovakia, he says, ‘there was nothing to spend it on’). But money wasn’t really the point: ‘It was about the adventure.’ And, if nothing else, he had triumphantly rekindled the English love affair with the race.
Lata and Breyer returned the following year. So did Collins and Stephen’s Society. The latter pairing was greeted with an unexpected warning: foul play was planned. It was the Velká Pardubická’s centenary, and it seemed that, while everyone had been happy to see a plucky English adventurer win once, a repeat victory would not be acceptable. The warnings came from multiple sources, including a waitress at Collins’s hotel who drew a diagram on a napkin showing how two Russians planned to obstruct him at Taxis. An anonymous phone call to the British embassy identified two suspects. The ambassador arranged a meeting with them, along with the director of the State Racecourses organisation (who according to Collins ‘looked as though he spent most of his life interrogating people in a basement’). Through an interpreter, Collins warned the trio that Stephen’s Society was big enough to look after himself and that any attempt at interference would be met with a robust response.
In the event, despite some minor jostling in the early stages, the race proceeded without foul play. Collins fell at Taxis ‘without any assistance from anyone’ . He then remounted, against his better instincts but in keeping with what he realised was ‘the spirit of the race’ . He fell again at the Big Water Jump; remounted again; and eventually finished a distant and dispirited third. But his gameness had been noted, and at the post-race dinner that same director of the State Racecourses organisation made a point of coming up to him to say: ‘Mr Collins, you are sportsman.’ The compliment seems to have delighted him almost as much as the previous year’s victory – ‘like a cloud . . . yielding place to a blue sky’.
For Lata, this subplot is unlikely to have registered. Just being there was enough. A photograph taken that day shows her in her overcoat, sitting in the stand. She is gazing intently, alone: rugged and inscrutable as an Easter Island statue. Her lips are slightly parted. What she sees is clearly absorbing her. But you cannot be sure if what she sees are the horses and riders in front of her or those inside her head, from long ago.
That was Lata’s last visit to Pardubice. The journey was too daunting. Her eightieth birthday approached and passed. So did the fiftieth anniversary, in 1977, of her first appearance in the Velká Pardubická. So Lata missed the opportunity to see, that year, another landmark: the first attempt at the race by an Englishwoman.
The story would have interested her. Charlotte Brew’s journey to the starting line had been little easier than Lata’s. A twenty-one-year-old councillor’s daughter from Coggeshall, Essex, Brew was one of several British women to take advantage of the Sex Discrimination Act (1975) to exercise their right to compete as equals in steeplechases. (The Jockey Club, so helpful to Lata in 1927, had hitherto taken a less relaxed attitude to women in British racing.) In the spring of 1977, Brew had taken this right to its logical conclusion and become the first woman ever to ride in the Grand National.
Like Lata fifty years earlier, Brew was inexperienced: she had ridden in her first point-to-point three years before. Unlike Lata, she rode her own horse: a big twelve–year–old chestnut gelding called Barony Fort on whom she had won several point-to-points before coming fourth in the 1976 Liverpool Foxhunters Chase, which brought qualification for the next spring’s Grand National. As April 1977 approached, it dawned on the racing world that Brew actually intended to ride in the big race. The savagery of the collective response was shocking. Journalists, jockeys, trainers, male and female – everyone seemed to want to pile in. Brew was criticised for being too young, too weak, too reckless, too lacking in basic competence; and, by implication, too lacking in a sense of feminine decency. Her appearance was ‘ridiculous’ and ‘shouldn’t be allowed’, according to a group of female jockeys interviewed on television the night before the race; a group of male trainers threatened her with dire consequences if her incompetent riding interfered with their own horses’ efforts. The trainer David Nicholson denounced her attempt as ‘a complete horlicks’. The Racehorse magazine accused her of ‘courting disaster’.
The hostility began to affect Brew’s riding. She dealt with it by cutting herself off from all media coverage. (Her mother had already been hiding the worst of it.) On the positive side, the villagers of Coggeshall were supportive, and there was a flood of encouraging letters and telegrams. The women of the BBC typing pool informed her that they were so outraged by the cruel remarks of Julian Wilson, the racing correspondent, that they were refusing to do any more typing for him.
On race day, the Sun devoted its front page to the participation of ‘the dark-haired filly from Essex’, bumping Elvis Presley’s soon-to-be-terminal health problems on to page 3. The Aintree racegoers who mobbed Brew on the way to the start seemed on balance more supportive than hostile – although she could have done without some of the ‘mansplaining’ from well-wishers. The race itself was a disappointment, though. Fearful of humiliating herself, Brew started cautiously, and Barony Fort was never able to make up the lost ground. He spent most of the race bringing up the rear before refusing at the fourth from last. By normal standards it was a respectable first attempt, but Brew felt bitterly disappointed. And so, six months later, she found her way with Barony Fort to Pardubice, to attempt a challenge that was arguably harder still.
It was a frightening journey for a young woman with little experience of foreign travel, let alone of life behind the Iron Curtain. Yet what she immediately realised was that she was welcome. She was provided with an interpreter, escorted, entertained: the Czechoslovaks seemed delighted that another foreigner should be brave enough and crazy enough to attempt their great national challenge. Her gender was relevant only insofar as it was another thing to admire her for. ‘They were very welcoming. And they made no distinction between the sexes, which was great.’
She was a little unnerved when a man who looked like a priest delivered what she assumed was a pre-race blessing. (It is more likely to have been a pep–talk from the starter.) And she initially assumed, when first shown Taxis, that those who said that it was a jump were joking. Yet the early stages of the race, at least, went well for her. ‘It was all a bit of a blur. We started slowly, and before I knew it we were at Taxis. I just closed my eyes and hoped for the best.’ They landed safely and were very comfortable over the next dozen obstacles. ‘We could easily have won,’ she says now. ‘He was running well within himself.’ But an unexpected encounter with a fallen horse at the Big Water Jump resulted in a spectacular fall, and although Brew remounted, Barony Fort – who had briefly disappeared under the water – had lost his zest. Little Taxis brought their race to an
end two jumps later.
Afterwards, Brew was made to feel more welcome than ever. Like other foreign visitors before and since, she discovered that, in the mad world-within-a-world of the Velká Pardubická, all that really counts is a have-a-go spirit. Demonstrate that, as Brew did, and – irrespective of your origins – your hosts will want to claim you as one of their own.
Brew – who now goes by her married name of Budd – responded to their warmth. For many years she remained in friendly contact with her interpreter, Vladimír Šabata. But there was one aspect of the race’s heritage that she didn’t discover until four decades later, either because everyone had already forgotten, or because no one had thought it worth mentioning.
‘I never realised,’ she told me in 2017, ‘that a lady had ever won the race.’
31.
Journey’s end
A part from a few faded newspaper cuttings, Lata had nothing to remind her of her triumphs. There had been trophies and rosettes once. Not now: not in the long, lonely days of the late 1970s. Even the silk scarf that Ra had given her in thanks for Norma’s victory had somehow been lost. As for Ra, he had died in 1975, in Rome, on New Year’s Day.
By 1978, she herself was fading. Younger relatives had slipped gently from the role of cared-for to that of carer. Friends joined them in visiting when they could and contributing what they could. When electricity finally reached Klínec, at around this time, Petr Jaroševský helped Petr Breyer’s father dig a ditch up the hillside, so that water could be pumped up to the cottage. Jan Pospíšil the elder continued to keep an eye on the sisters’ financial and legal affairs. Jan Pospíšil the younger used to bring Lata packets of her favourite cigarettes – Gîtanes and Gauloises – and then redoubled her pleasure by smoking them with her.
In November 1978, Petr Breyer organised a fox hunt near Líšnice. This didn’t involve any foxes: just a dragged scent and thirty dressed-up riders. It was, in part, a consciously anachronistic gesture of defiance: a celebration of a half-imagined Bohemian tradition that had more to do with the Kinskýs’ flamboyant world than with Communism’s grey orthodoxies. Its highlight was a visit to the meadows above Klínec, where Lata and her sisters, and Gikina Satorieová, and Harryk the hound, were waiting to watch them pass. Breyer brought the hunt to a halt and introduced them to Lata. The huntsmen sounded a fanfare in her honour, Breyer made a short speech, and then everyone applauded Lata. ‘It seemed to make her very happy indeed,’ says Breyer.
By 1979 it was hard to see how the elderly sisters could continue. All three were weak. Visitors worried that they weren’t eating properly.
Thamar Kinský, Radslav’s wife, was allowed to pay a quick visit to Czechoslovakia while on holiday in Austria and found a few spare hours to go and see Lata. She was shocked by what she saw. ‘She seemed frail and unwell and hardly seemed to know what was going on. But when I mentioned Radslav, her face lit up.’
Another visitor was Michal Horáček, then a journalist but later a politician (and in 2017 a presidential candidate). He thought the sisters seemed not only ‘frail’ but ‘obviously struggling to make ends meet’. Lata talked to him for quite a long time, but only about racing personalities of the 1920s and 1930s. ‘That was the world she found pretty and dignified,’ says Horáček. ‘What came after that was not worth even mentioning.’
In June, Lata was invited to make a guest appearance at Velká Chuchle with Eva Palyzová and Míla Hermansdorferová – a pioneering flat-racing jockey who in 1972 had become the first woman rider to win the Czech Derby. Illness prevented her from attending. By then, the sisters rarely even made it to church. Instead, Father Javůrek went regularly to the cottage to give them mass.
In the autumn of 1979, Kristýna fell ill. She died of pneumonia on 25 November. This may have been the moment when her eighty-four-year-old twin began to lose the will to live. It proved too complicated to bury her in the family tomb: the land was no longer the family’s and the tomb had, in any case, been damaged (some said vandalised) in 1974. Instead, Kristýna’s ashes were buried in the new cemetery at Líšnice.
The remote cottage was no longer a viable home for Lata and Johanna. Arrangements were set in motion for Johanna to live with Gikina Satorieová. (They eventually found a couple of rooms to rent from a Líšnice farmer, Mička Kaščák.) Meanwhile, Lata received a visit from Ernst Haan, her nephew (Gabriele’s son) from Austria. He, too, was shocked by the state she was in and tried to persuade Lata to move with him to Reiteregg.
Lata was reluctant: why would she want to move to an unfamiliar country after a lifetime on Czech soil? In any case, she hated having a fuss made over her. But Haan had a special inducement: at Reiteregg, he explained, Lata would be among horses. According to Saša Jaroševský, ‘When she agreed to go to Austria, horses were the magnet that drew her. She loved horses more than anything.’
It took time to arrange the migration. There was still an Iron Curtain to cross. Eventually, in September 1980, Haan was able to come and fetch Lata. She was smiling as he helped her into his car. Eva Pospíšilová waved her off. Then came the long drive to Austria. It felt, perhaps, like the beginning of a longer journey. It was.
At Reiteregg, Lata found what has been described as a ‘horse paradise’. Not only were there stables and riding horses and carriage horses, but her new home – a big, solid castle with stuccoed walls and a turreted clock tower – was set on a wide, green, peaceful hill-top. Rich pastures sloped gently all around, grazed by horses, with roll after roll of receding hills stretching out beyond. It is hard to imagine a more elegiac place for a horse lover to sit and watch the sun going down over what used to be the Habsburg heartlands. On a clear day you can see half of Austria. Perhaps Lata wondered if, somewhere on the dissolving horizon, the Řitka of her childhood might somehow be visible as well, waiting for her to spot it.
A few minutes’ walk from the castle walls stood a small private chapel, where prayers could be said. Family members were buried here. For the first time in years, Lata’s deepest thirsts, for horses and for God, could be satisfied with relative ease. As an extra mercy, Kristýna’s remains were transferred to Reiteregg and reinterred at the chapel. The thought of being separated from her lifelong companion and twin would have been hard for Lata to bear.
All that remained was to wait.
Perhaps she missed home. I doubt she missed the cottage in the woods, but she must have thought sometimes of Řitka. She did not share any such yearnings with her hosts. According to her (late) niece, Dorothea Haan, she still never said a word about the loss of her family home or the way she and her sisters had been treated by the Communists. Horses, church, family, the great horsemen of days gone by: that was what filled her spoken thoughts. The rest she kept to herself.
She died peacefully, on 12 May 1981. When news reached Czechoslovakia, it was marked by a down-page sentence on one or two sports pages. There were no obituaries. She was buried at Reiteregg. Her name can still be seen in the little chapel, on a stone plaque, directly beneath Kristýna ‘s. For some reason the sight of that carved name makes me think of the sentence carved in stone on the tomb of Pope Gregory VII – Saint Gregory – in Salerno Cathedral. The words, supposedly the eleventh-century pontiff’s last, are adapted from Psalm 44. I am sure they would have been familiar to Lata. And I can’t help imagining her saying them quietly to herself, as she gazed northwards over the Austrian hills towards her distant homeland: ‘I have loved justice and hated iniquity; therefore I die in exile.’
Perhaps I am underestimating her resilience. Many people did. A less troubled version of her story can be found in two photographs from that final six-month sojourn in her dead sister’s castle: the last surviving snapshots of Lata’s life.
In one, probably taken in 1981, she sits upright in a broad, straight-backed armchair, in a warm brown cardigan, in a room flooded with evening sunlight, rich as a blood orange. There is no suggestion of pain, physical or mental. Instead, she gazes calmly at the camera: enigmati
c, unflinching; but also untroubled.
The other picture was taken outdoors, on a wide track near the castle. Ernst Haan is driving a four-wheeled carriage, drawn by a pair of what look like Haflinger ponies, an Austrian breed not unlike the Kinský horse in colouring, with rich golden-chestnut hides and long, flaxen manes and tails. Lata is sitting in the carriage, alongside a lady who may be Dorothea Haan, Lata’s niece. The green slope behind them is lightly planted with young trees. Beyond, indistinct highlands blur into a pale blue sky. Lata is wrapped in a long coat. It must be autumn; perhaps October. We cannot tell what Lata is thinking: we never could. But she is laughing.
32.
The right stuff
In 1987, two leading Czechoslovak sportswriters, Ivan Hanousek and Jiří Lacina, published a 416–page compilation of mini biographies called Our Famous Sportspeople. It featured 156 of the most notable sporting personalities in Czechoslovak history, including nearly thirty women. There was no room in it for Lata Brandisová. Fifty years on from her unparalleled triumph in Pardubice, her glory had been erased from her nation’s collective consciousness. It has yet to be fully restored.
The Velká Pardubická, by contrast, has thrived without interruption, all through the greyest days of Communism and through the capitalist free-for-all that succeeded them in November 1989. The latter left Pardubice’s streets spattered with coffee shops and garish shopping malls; the return of tourism persuaded some of the town’s hotels to modernise. But the spirit of its famous race endured, barely changing, no matter how many contrasting regimes came and went. Josef Váňa, the most celebrated Czech racing hero of modern times, won his first Velká Pardubická in 1987 and was still being celebrated for his barely sane disregard for pain and danger when he won his eighth in 2011. He was by turns a hero of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic; a hero of the democratic Czechoslovakia of 1989–92; and a hero of the new Czech Republic that came into being on New Year’s Day 1993. He won at least one Velká Pardubická as a citizen of each nation, and each time his compatriots understood what it meant: he had won a terrifying steeplechase, heroically simple in the rawness of its challenge, in which only the bravest and the best could hope to win but anyone bold enough to attempt the challenge could win friendship, respect and a lifetime of warm welcomes in Pardubice.