The Sport of Queens

by Dick Francis

  In spite of sharing the races with Martin in my first season for Lord Bicester, I had ridden in a good proportion of them, and I was perfectly content to be on Parthenon for my first try at the National.

  A few days before the race, however, Martin was hurt in a fall, and was not going to be fit enough to ride. There was panic in the Bicester camp. Two horses entered, and only one junior jockey who had never attempted the race before, to ride them.

  Lord Bicester himself remained calm. Dick should ride Roimond, he said, and someone else must be found for Parthenon. It was a show of faith in me which I still remember gratefully, and I was determined to do all I could to win for him. He had been trying for nearly thirty years to win the National, but none of his many runners had ever finished nearer than seventh.

  The atmosphere in the changing-room on National day is electric.

  Suppressed excitement is tightening everyone’s muscles, so they do with deliberation, and consciously, as if it were all new, the things they do every racing day of the year. Smiles have a different quality: they become an acknowledgement of the hazards ahead, a sympathetic recognition that everyone is suffering from the same tension and the same gripping hope. No one has slept very well, because of this hope. Many have dreamt they have won the race; no one dares to believe that he will.

  There are perhaps forty jockeys to be weighed out, so there is a queue by the scales. There is a newsreel camera behind the clerk of the scales, pointing its round eye at you and recording your every blink. Weighed out, you have a last private word with your trainer, who looks as strained as you feel. Then you sit in the changing-room to wait. You have no heart for the chatter and jokes of ordinary days. Rows of silent jockeys sit on the benches, with their elbows on their knees, and stare at their boots. Half an hour passes interminably, until at last, at long last, the time has come.

  I thought the nervous excitement I felt before I went out to ride Roimond was because it was my first National, but I felt it every year afterwards. One never gets used to it.

  Roimond was looking splendid, his rich dark chestnut coat gleaming in the March sunlight. As he was carrying top weight and therefore had the lowest number on the race card, we led the parade of horses in numerical order past the stands. I would have been glad to have had someone in front of me. It was lonely and awe-inspiring, walking up the course under the gaze of a quarter of a million people.

  Once we were off, however, there was no time for emotion. Choose the opening, present the horse, jump the fence, think forward to the next one.

  Roimond made no serious mistakes, as we went twice round the long circuit. He was leading for some of the way, and was always going well in the first five or six. As we started the last mile, he was so easily holding his own against all the other horses I could see, that I began to think that, incredibly, I might actually be going to win. The next moment, however, two horses came past me, and one was going so fast that I knew I could not overtake him again. Roimond jumped the last fence in third place, but struggled up into second as we raced towards the winning post.

  Ahead of me, flashing away, I could see the familiar black and white quartered colours, the very jersey I had worn so often myself, of the winner, Russian Hero.

  Lord Bicester was delighted to be as near as second. He comfortingly said that the great difference in the weight they were carrying had been the cause of Russian Hero beating his horse. But nothing he could say could take away the irony of the situation. Russian Hero had won; the horse I had ridden to victory so often myself, the horse whose life I had possibly saved when he had colic, the horse, moreover, who had fallen in his last three races before the National, and who was known to jump well only if he met the fence correctly.

  George Owen had even been doubtful of running him at all. He had wanted to run him in an easier race earlier in the week, but his owner, Fearnie Williamson, insisted on him taking his chance in the National.

  In spite of my personal disappointment, I could not help being glad for George’s sake that he had trained the National winner. Always a quiet man, he was absolutely speechless with pleasure, and his broad smile seemed like a permanent fixture on his happy face.

  In the weighing-room the tension had dissolved. Champagne corks were popping, backs were being slapped, betting tales as improbable as fishing stories were being swapped, and a hundred voices were raised in excited discussion.

  It is the same every year.

  Before the war, when the National was run on Friday, and everyone was staying for the Saturday races, the winning owner gave a party in Liverpool on Friday night. Since the war, however, the National is usually held on a Saturday, and at the end of the day nearly everyone goes home, so the party, which is sometimes not given that night at all, is only a shadow of its former glory.

  Fearnie Williamson’s party was different. He is a prosperous Cheshire farmer, and he wanted to have a Cheshire party.

  A hotel in Chester astonishingly agreed to put on a dinner for about a hundred people at four hours’ notice. and the great win was properly celebrated. Everyone made speeches. Fearnie made a speech. George made a speech. Leo McMorrow, who rode the horse, made a speech. I said if I had known Russian Hero would beat me in the National I would certainly have let him die of colic, but there was no one I would have wanted to win more than George, if I could not. George, Fearnie and Leo said there was no one they would rather see win than me, if they had not.

  It got a little complicated and misty-eyed towards the end, but it was a great evening.

  The cause of it all, the Hero of the occasion, was munching his ordinary feed, back in his own quiet stable. He did not know he was famous.

  After Liverpool the rest of the season goes on for two months, during which the three lesser ‘Nationals’ take place, the Scots, the Irish, and the Welsh. The meetings get fewer every week, the one-day country meetings are held, and the big courses gradually change over to flat racing. The last steeplechase meeting at Chepstow is at Easter, when the Welsh National is run.

  One morning after Russian Hero’s National I was up on the Berkshire Downs, schooling some of Lord Bicester’s horses for George Beeby, when he asked me to school a horse for Ken Cundell. I had not met Ken before. He lived in Compton, the same village as George Beeby, and he had been training on his own for only a few seasons.

  Ken gave me a leg up on to a compact chestnut with a very white face and four white socks, and I took the horse up over George Beeby’s excellent schooling fences. He was a wonderful jumper. Ken explained that his usual jockey had gone home to Ireland, and asked me if I would ride the chestnut at Cheltenham a few days later. I was glad to. The race was a novice chase, and Hereford, the chestnut, had never run over fences before, although he had won hurdle races. He took to Cheltenham like a veteran, led all the way round, flew over the fences, and won easily.

  Ken asked me on the spot to ride for him in the Welsh National, and his entry, Fighting Line, won that easily too.

  It was some compensation to me, after being second on Roimond; and by a strange coincidence, the only other time I won the Welsh National was just after Devon Loch had come so close to winning the big race. Lose one, and win the other, has been the pattern for me twice.

  About the time that I started riding for Ken, Gerald Balding asked me to ride some of his horses too, and it was settled that when Lord Bicester did not need me, I would, during the next season, ride for him, and for Ken as well.

  I was now to ride regularly for three stables which were all in the south of England, and we still lived in Cheshire. The continual journeys backwards and forwards were tiresome, but there seemed to be no houses to let near Compton, and Mary and I were very fond of our flat in Cheshire. The flat was a converted hayloft, and we had spent much time and energy in painting every inch of it, and making it into a comfortable home.

  The dilemma was solved for us in an unpleasant way.

  One morning in October Mary and I parted for a week. She was going
to London to stay with her mother, and I was to ride in Scotland, at Kelso, and then spend a night with my uncle at Cheltenham, over the Chepstow meeting a few days later. I rang Mary up once or twice during the week, and she said she had influenza and was feeling a little weak, but neither of us thought anything of it, as we both have strong constitutions.

  Then one morning, as my uncle and I were preparing to leave his house on our way to Chepstow races, the telephone rang. It was Mary.

  She said, ‘Darling, you are not to worry, but I shall not be here when you come to London this evening. I have got to go to hospital.’

  She sounded quite light-hearted.

  ‘What is the matter with you?’ I asked. I almost thought she was joking.

  She said, ‘It is really only a formality, but I have got a notifiable illness and there is no choice about it. I have got to go to an isolation hospital.

  ‘Is it measles?’ I asked, ‘or perhaps scarlet fever?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘As a matter of fact—and you are not to worry because I am quite all right—as a matter of fact it is infantile paralysis.’

  We talked some more, and she was laughing. I asked if she would like me to come up to London instead of going to Chepstow, but she would not hear of it.

  ‘I am quite all right. Come and see me this evening,’ she said.

  I drove up to London fast after the races, and out to Neasden Isolation Hospital.

  Mary had certainly sounded all right, as she had said, on the telephone. But she did not look all right. Her face was yellow and grey, and she looked ill and old. It was clear that she was very far from being all right.

  The following evening she was moved into an artificial respirator. I had promised my parents I would let them know how she was, so I walked out to the telephone kiosk at the hospital gates. As I dialled the number my mind was filled with the image of Mary as I had just left her, with only her head free of the grey painted wooden box which enclosed her body while a big electric bellows pumped air in and out of her lungs. I stood trembling and shaking with the receiver in my hand, and when Mother answered and I tried to speak to her I found I was uncontrollably crying.

  I hated having to leave Mary alone and go on racing, but the doctors assured me that her life was not in immediate danger, and she herself insisted, as usual, that she was ‘quite all right’. So every day, after I had ridden, I drove back to Neasden.

  It was a wonderful hospital, and no praise is too high. There were no visiting hours, for visits to polio patients were not restricted at all. One Saturday I drove down from Liverpool after racing there, and did not arrive until half-past nine in the evening; the night sister not only seemed glad to see me, but she gave me some supper as well.

  At Wolverhampton one day I had a fall, but felt nothing wrong, and drove off as usual towards London. When the warmth died out of me in the November air, and my muscles stiffened, I found I could not move my left arm properly. I was through the outskirts of Wolverhampton, and wondered whether I should turn back for for some treatment, but decided it would be better to go on, because I was bound for a hospital in any case.

  After a short while I could not put my hand back on to the gear lever to change gear. I stopped the car, put my left hand on to the gear lever knob with my right hand, and started off again. Luckily it was a car with a short lever rising from the floor close to my left side, so that the force of gravity was helping to hold my hand on it. I drove all the way from Wolverhampton to London without taking my hand off the gear lever, trying to convince myself that my forearm muscles were only bruised, and that no bones were broken.

  There were some good horses for me to ride at the Manchester November meeting at the end of the week, and at Birmingham and Cheltenham after that, so I spent the next two days, which were free, with Mary, anxiously wiggling my fingers to see if they were still in working order.

  A dozen races and two winners later, I broke my collar-bone again at Cheltenham, and went to London to have it dealt with by Bill Tucker. When my shoulder was strapped up, I asked him if I could have some massage on my left arm. He felt it, and I could see his fingers stop as they came to the bump I had been trying to persuade myself was not there.

  ‘You’ve broken it,’ he said accusingly, ‘and you must have known. One bone in your forearm has been acting as a splint for the other.’

  He made me a removable plaster cast to wear, and for the next fortnight I sat with Mary doing crossword puzzles, while the cracks quietly knitted together again.

  Bill Tucker is an institution that many of us could not do without. He is that rare man, a surgeon who realises that if muscles are allowed to rest while bones mend, the total recovery time will be prolonged. From the first he prescribes gentle massage and faradism, an electric treatment which exercises muscles while the owner of them relaxes and thinks about something else.

  Mr Tucker’s special interest is in injuries to people whose livelihood depends on their being fit. Ballet dancers, cricketers, and rugger players, as well as jockeys, are among his regular patients, and he patches them up and sends them back to their jobs as fast as he can.

  While Mary was in hospital Ken Cundell asked me if I was still looking for a house in Berkshire. I said that indeed I was, but had had very little time to see about it lately. He then offered me the house he had once lived in himself, which was empty. I was very pleased by the suggestion, and delighted when I saw the house. It is a very old black and white fronted house with many small tiled gables, settling into the ground as old houses do.

  Ken showed me round it, and apologised that one entire outside wall was missing; it was being rebuilt. There were several other repairs to be done, and the whole of the inside was to be redecorated, so the house would not be ready to live in until the following March.

  Mary and I were both glad that the uncertainty about where we were to live had ended so pleasantly, and she spent many hours, before she left hospital, mentally arranging furniture in rooms she had never seen.

  During the months before the house was ready for us we lived in London, for after she had left hospital Mary still had to go every day for treatment for her weak muscles. We never lived again in our first home, the hayloft flat.

  In March the move to Compton was completed. A week or two later I left Mary in Oxford, and went up to ride at Bangor-on-Dee races.

  Bangor-on-Dee has always been a course of good omen for me. It was there that I rode in my first race under National Hunt Rules; it was there that I rode my first winner; and it was there also that I first rode three winners in one afternoon. So it was not really surprising that it should have been on the day of Bangor-on-Dee races that our first son was born. I drove down in record time from Bangor, and arrived in Oxford half an hour before he did.

  5

  It’s an Up and Down Life

  BY the autumn of 1950, when the new season began, life had arranged things very happily and tidily for us. Mary was gaining strength every day, and her hands and wrists, which had been badly affected, were gradually beginning to work again. Our small son was thriving, we were settled into our pleasant house, and I was riding for two stables which were both in the same village. Some of Ken Cundell’s horses, in fact, were stabled opposite our kitchen windows, so my work was almost literally on the doorstep.

  The season before had been a very lonely one for Mary and me. I had had to leave her sometimes for days at a time, and it was a great joy and relief to both of us when she was strong enough, a year after she became ill, to come with me again on my travels.

  In all the years she has been going to meetings with me, Mary’s interest in racing has remained mild, though she knows a good deal about it by now. She is no longer liable to repeat the answer she gave someone years ago who asked her what colour Roimond was.

  ‘Auburn,’ she said.

  The reaction of the racing fraternity to this remark was worthy of a Bateman drawing.

  Before we met, Mary had never been to a race meet
ing, but after our marriage she went with me every day she possibly could, to keep me company, and, as she callously said, ‘to pick up the bits’. Mary used to ride as a child, but no longer feels any urge to do so. She never studies the form book, never has a bet, and we hardly ever talk about horses at home: a most restful state of affairs for us both.

  During our engagement several members of our families gloomily foretold that Mary’s lack of interest in horses would be the downfall of our marriage, but from the first it was a joke between us, and through the years we have found it has balanced my own single-minded concentration into a shared sense of proportion.

  It cannot be easy to be a jockey’s wife, or indeed to be the wife of any sportsman whose sole aim is to go faster than the rivals on his heels. Day after day she may wait on the stands, anxiously watching her husband take the unavoidable risks of his profession, happily cheering him home when he wins, but knowing for a certainty that sooner or later the bad falls will come, like kings disastrously turning up in a game of clock patience.

  Nearly everyone used to ask Mary the same question:

  ‘Don’t you worry when your husband is racing?’

  And I have heard her answer, with a comic expression of self-mockery:

  ‘Only when they start waving the white flag for the ambulance.’

  But Mary tells me that all jockeys’ wives, however united a front of composure they show to the world, and however lightly they evade the truthful answer, find a familiar dread lying in wait for them every time the tapes go up, and the thousandth time is as bad as the first.

  I also was often asked if I ever felt any qualms for my own safety, and I said honestly that I did not, for I never expected to fall, and I sometimes found it hard to believe that all was lost, even when my close contact with the ground was a depressing reality.