The Sport of Queens

by Dick Francis

  Touching the actual technique of writing, I listen in a slight daze to people talking knowledgeably of ‘first drafts’ and ‘second drafts’, because when I began to write I didn’t know such things existed. I also didn’t know that book authors commonly have ‘editors’, publishers’ assistants who tidy the prose and suggest changes of content: I thought that a book as first written was what got (or didn’t get) published, and I wrote accordingly. The first shot had to be the best I could do.

  I still write that way. My ‘first draft’ is IT. I can’t rewrite to any extent: I’ve tried once or twice, but I haven’t the mental stamina and I feel all the time that although what I’m attempting may be different, it won’t be better and may very well be worse, because my heart isn’t in it. Publishers’ editors have mournfully bowed to this state of affairs and resignedly ask only for a single word to be changed here or there, or for something obscure to be explained.

  When I write any one sentence, I think first of all of what I want it to say. Then I think of a way of saying it. Usually at this point I write it down (in longhand, in pencil, in an exercise book) but if I think that the form my thought has taken is a bit dull or pompous I just sit and wait, and after a while a new shape of words drifts into my head, and I write that down instead. Sometimes I rub bits out and try again, but once the sentence looks all right on paper I go on to the next one and repeat the process, and so on. It’s all pretty slow as one sentence can sometimes take half an hour.

  On the following morning I read what I’ve written and if it still looks all right, I go on from there. If it doesn’t look all right, I may despair that my work isn’t good enough but all the same I don’t often alter it except to add a word or two or perhaps insert a whole new sentence. When I’ve done a couple of chapters I type them onto a word-processor and it is this typescript when finished which goes to the printer.

  I start consequently at Chapter 1, page 1, and plod on to THE END; and although by page 1, I have a fair idea of what the book is going to be about in general, I never know exactly what is going to happen. The story grows while I write it.

  I expect a great many authors work this way, if not most: and it is this gradual evolution of sentences, images, thoughts and plot patterns that I used to take for granted but now find increasingly mysterious.

  Thanks to John Johnson’s efforts, and more recently to those of his associate and successor, Andrew Hewson, the books have spread around the world in widening ripples, turning up in many languages, including, for instance, Norwegian, Czechoslovakian and Japanese. They’ve been read as serials and been dramatised into plays for radio; been recorded on cassettes and printed in large type for poor eyes; they’ve been abridged and digested and also simplified for adults just learning to read.

  It would be unnatural not to take pleasure in all this and I am in fact vain enough to get a kick out of seeing the books in airport bookstalls from Paris to Los Angeles, and in finding them in odd places like the village store-cum-restaurant in the back of beyond in Africa where we stopped for breakfast one morning. When Pan Books advertised Bonecrack on the front of the London buses (during May 1973), I stood in Oxford Street watching them go by with an absolutely fatuous smile.

  Over the years the books have collected some much-prized awards—first a Silver Dagger (runner-up, best crime novel, British awards) for For Kicks in 1965, then in 1970 in America the Edgar Allan Poé award for the best mystery of the year for Forfeit.

  In 1980–81, to my surprise and delight, the one book, Whip Hand, took both top awards, the Gold Dagger in Britain and the ‘Edgar’ in America. People may think I am blasé about these votes of confidence, but I absolutely am not: I am quite humbly proud of the honour of being given them.

  Although film options have been taken out from time to time on most of the books, it seems that the stories are difficult to translate on to the screen. Only one, Dead Cert, has so far reached the big screen, and in spite of its marvellous action scenes, it made little impact at the box office. The Russians, incidentally, made their own ‘Dead Cert’ movie to show on Moscow television; it lasted three hours in all and was shown twice, so that when I went to Moscow in 1977 I found that almost everyone had seen it, although I didn’t know until then that it had been made. The Russian television people invited Mary and me to see clips of it privately, and we found it delightful, even though we couldn’t understand a word that was said, and guessed the standard of the racing would give our own Jockey Club a fit.

  Television indeed seems to suit the stories fairly well and I was very pleased when Yorkshire Television used Odds Against as the basis for a series of six episodes, shown under the umbrella title of ‘The Racing Game’. The success of this short series, due almost entirely to the skills of producer Jacky Stoller and actor Mike Gwilym, has had a direct effect on my life in many ways, not least in America, where the films were shown and repeated on public service television, coast to coast. Sales of the books themselves more than doubled in America in the year that ‘The Racing Game’ appeared, hoisting me into a bracket there that I had not earlier achieved.

  To Mike Gwilym also I owe the existence of the double award-winner, Whip Hand, since it was because the Royal Shakespeare Company actor so incredibly matched my concept of Sid Halley, chief character of Odds Against, that I became interested in writing a second book about the same man. Sid Halley, in Odds Against, lost his left hand, and in Whip Hand I set out to explore the mental difficulties of someone coming to terms with such a loss. In the event, it proved a most disturbing book to write, a psychological wringer which gave me insomnia for months.

  In publishing circles, they talk about authors being ‘on a plateau’. They mean that an author who has had a little success will remain on that level for a while. Then something, perhaps a better-than-usual book or perhaps a quirk of publicity, will raise the sales to a new level—to a new plateau, where things will again remain level for a while. A further boost may achieve a new higher plateau, and so on until one presumably falls off the top of the mountain because there’s nowhere else to go.

  A ‘plateau’ can last from a few years to a lifetime. I’ve discernibly reached three plateaux so far, each lasting for a good long while. ‘The Racing Game’ and Whip Hand took me to the third plateau, where I stand at this time of writing: and the view from here is great. If to be fulfilled as a writer is to be read, then I can’t complain.

  On the personal front, the years have brought more comforts than sadnesses, more cement than dissolution. My first-sight wife puts up with me still and has become my chief and indispensible researcher. As with so much else in our lives, what later came to seem full-time and inevitable began casually, in this case with a few notes about quartz and gem stones, gathered from the tomes of Oxford’s public library and used as the hobby of the villain in Odds Against.

  A year later, we flew to Italy on a horse-transport plane, with me working my passage helping with the horses themselves and Mary taking general notes and photographs. We set off from Gatwick at 6 am, flew in an old unpressurised D.C.4. to Milan, spent three hours on the ground and returned to England, loading and unloading eight horses at each end. By a late bedtime we were hopelessly exhausted—but we had the whole basis of Flying Finish.

  A little later, for that same book, we went to Oxford airport to gather some up-to-date information about civilian flying and light aircraft, as my own R.A.F. knowledge was not applicable. We asked so many questions that the instructors suggested I took up flying again myself to find out the answers. Because of my newspaper work, I said I didn’t have time. Send your wife, they answered jokingly: and she went.

  Until the day she took her first lesson, she had literally never touched a small aeroplane. She had no real desire to fly and intended to go up two or three times only, just for as long as there were research questions to ask.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, after her third flight. ‘That’s fine. You don’t need to bother any more.’

  ‘Er, um,
’ she said. ‘I like it. I think I’ll just have two or three more lessons.’

  After those, she thought she might just as well go on until she’d flown solo. ‘Just for the satisfaction.’

  The satisfaction lasted for four quiet months. Then she pensively said, ‘I think I might go back and get my licence…’ and that time there was no stopping. She flew in all for eleven years, gaining a much-cherished Instrument Rating which enabled her to fly on the airways. We owned at one time three small aircraft, two leased as an investment to the Oxford Air School and one which Mary flew herself and which we also operated (with commercial pilots) as an air-taxi, chiefly ferrying owners, trainers and jockeys to the races.

  The book Rat Race stemmed entirely from our air-taxi firm, which flourished later under another ownership but still under the name we gave it, Merlix Air, a name made up from half of Merrick and half of Felix (our sons; wholly sentimental). Mary herself wrote a book on how to fly aeroplanes, at first called A Beginner’s Guide to Flying but now revised and brought up to date as Flying Start.

  In the course of research for In the Frame, she learnt to paint in oils, and because of Reflex became a semiprofessional photographer with a darkroom in the bathroom. Twice Shy found her learning how to write computer programmes. For Smokescreen she went down a gold mine and for Whip Hand we both went up in a hot-air balloon. If I want, however, to write about scuba diving round sunken wrecks, she says I’ll have to do it on my own.

  Our two little boys are now grown men with lives, houses and wives of their own. Merrick inherited the racing blood and trains both Flat racers and jumpers in the village of Lambourn. Felix, a natural-born pilot, would have liked a career in the R.A.F. or in civilian flying, but a hip operation which he underwent in childhood deterred the institutions from accepting him. With a degree in Physics behind him, he turned to school-mastering instead, and is to me a highly useful source of information about bombs, guns and general scientific mayhem.

  Both boys married great girls, and now we have several much-loved grandchildren to give an extra dimension to our lives. We lived in the 1954 house for thirty-one years but, with the passing of time, the breathing problems started by Mary’s polio developed into bronchitis and asthma. As in a warm climate these difficulties disappeared we began spending winter months in Florida, and by 1986 had moved there almost full time. The change has been good for us both, and we are both aware that in all important ways we are deeply and undeservedly fortunate.

  There have of course been disappointments and anxieties and griefs, as there are in every life. I felt particularly keenly the loss of my publisher, Anthea Joseph, who died of cancer in her mid-fifties in January 1981. Left the young widow of Michael Joseph, she was promoted editorial director and then Chairman of the firm, seeing it grow under her expert influence into one of the greatest of publishing houses and becoming herself throughout the book world exceptionally admired and loved. I was privileged to read a poem for her at her Memorial Service, a sad requiem to a close friendship and business relationship which had lasted twenty years.

  In 1973, after sixteen years, I gave up my column in the Sunday Express and, although it had been an absorbing, rewarding occupation, I retired that time without any of the earlier awful feeling of amputation. The second time I was not being irrevocably severed from a job I loved, but moving on to wider horizons.

  Since then Mary and I have travelled a good deal and have met fascinating people of all sorts all round the world. We’ve been wherever the chance arose—such as to America, Australia, New Zealand, Holland and Norway for book-promotion tours, to South Africa and to Canada both for book-promotion and to judge hunters in international horse shows, to race meetings in Czechoslovakia and sophisticated Singapore and odd out-of-the-way places where the grandstands were a grassy bank. I’ve found that moving everywhere simultaneously in two different worlds —horses and books—has given me perhaps wider understandings of humanity than either might have done on its own.

  Looking back to the 1956 Grand National, so much that has happened since that day seems incredible. One is forced to wonder how much would have been the same if Devon Loch had won that race; and, in honesty, I think I owe more to his collapse than I might have to his victory.

  I was a jockey for a little over ten years. To be precise, there were nine years and eight months between my first win on Wrenbury Tiger and my last on Crudwell: and despite all the satisfactions that have come my way since, those years, in retrospect, were the special ones. The first growth; the true vintage.

  The best years of my life.

  1a The author, aged 13, on the late Bertram Mills’ pony, Edgware Silver Star

  lb Twenty years later

  2 The cigarette advertisement picture of Roimond (No.2) jumping Becher’s Brook in the 1950 Grand National. The horse on the right is Freebooter (Jimmy Power), the eventual winner; and behind him is Monaveen (Tony Grantham), who was jointly owned by H.M. the Queen and H.M. the Queen Mother

  3a The National Hunt Steeplechase (amateur riders) at Cheltenham, 1948. The author is on No. 47, Lord Shrewsbury’s Sam Spider. He finished seventh or eighth

  3b Possible winning the Molyneux Chase at Aintree in the Duchess of Norfolk’s colours. Broomfield (David Punshon) follows him over the last fence

  4 Mrs Hall Hall’s Fighting Line falling at Sandown Park

  In the first photograph, the horses are Cromwell, No.6—the winner (Lord Mildmay), Soda II (René Emery) and, on the right, Freebooter (Jimmy Power). In the sixth photograph (opposite) No. 16 is Nickel Coin (Tommy Shone)

  5 He rolled …

  right over me …

  my feet reappeared

  6a Finnure jumping the Chair fence at Liverpool, March 1950. Beside him is Coloured Schoolboy (Arthur Thompson)

  6b Lord Bicester’s Silver Fame winning the Golden Miller Chase at Cheltenham, April 1950. Close behind are, on the left, Glen Fire (M. O’Dwyer) and, in the centre, Castledermot (Tim Molony)

  7 H.M. the Queen Mother’s M’as-Tu-Vu winning at Kempton Park in 1953

  8 Mass depression at the first fence, Grand National, 1951. From left to right: Paddy Fitzgerald, Bryan Marshall, the author, Pat Taaffe, Bob McCreery, Jack Dowdeswell and Michael Scudamore. Mick O’Dwyer is bending down

  9 Parading Miss Dorothy Paget’s Mont Tremblant; I rode him while Dave Dick was on the sidelines after an accident

  10a In the parade ring before the 1956 Grand National: with the author is H.M. the Queen Mother, Princess Margaret, H.M. the Queen and Lord Sefton. Devon Loch’s trainer, Peter Cazalet, is next to the Queen Mother

  10b John Hole leads out Devon Loch

  11a Becher’s Brook the second time round: left to right—Devon Loch, E.S.B. (D. Dick) the eventual winner, and Sundew (F. Winter) about to fall

  11b The Royal party on top of the stands at the moment Devon Loch starts his historic ‘pancake’: in the front row, left to right, are Princess Margaret, H.M. the Queen, the Princess Royal, Mrs Peter Cazalet, Peter Cazalet and H.M. the Queen Mother

  12/13 (Reading from left to right) The film shots Devon Loch’s collapse just fifty yards from the winning post

  14a Dick Francis at Sandown Park in March 1956, the meeting immediately following the Grand National

  14b Mrs John White’s Lochroe jumping the water at Sandown Park. On the left is King’s Rose (Mr H. Hodge)

  15 Mrs D. M. Cooper’s Crudwell being led in after winning the Welsh National, 1956

  16a Judging hunters at the Wokingham Show, 1980

  16b Nostalgia 1981: the trial scales in the jockeys’ changing room at Newbury. The flat lead pieces lying on the table are slipped into weight-cloths to bring the jockey up to the required weight

  Acknowledgements

  I wish to acknowledge my sincere and permanent gratitude…

  To Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, for the great honour of her patronage, and for her gracious consent to the title of this book.

  To the Most Hon
. the Marquess of Abergavenny, whose generous help and constant good advice I have deeply appreciated.

  To all owners and trainers who have employed me, for the fun I have had on their horses, and to my fellow jockeys for the pleasure I have found in their company.

  To my neighbour, Geoffrey Boumphrey, author and inventor, for the lessons I learned from his lucid prose style.

  And to Mary, my wife, for more than she will allow me to say.

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