I would later reflect upon my reaction with a mixture of surprise and disbelief. Not because it was so abnormal, but because it was so ridiculously normal.
I was often jokingly referred to as ‘Iceman Murphy’ by my riding colleagues for staying cool under pressure, for my resilience in the moments that mattered. Never weaken when you need to strengthen, I had taught myself. And I had tried to follow this in every setback that life had thrown my way.
But this time was different. These were murky waters riddled with treacherous unknowns. A formidable challenge, even for the most unflinching of us. And yet, I had treated it in the same way as I would any other mishap. What would amaze me – years later, when I had time to reflect upon this – was how one never really wavers from that initial gut instinct, despite the magnitude of the circumstances. It was subconscious, of course it was subconscious, but it didn’t matter that I had suffered one of the most horrific accidents in racing history. It didn’t matter that I was a twenty-eight-year-old man, who had woken up as a twelve-year-old child. My reaction was exactly the same as it would have been if I was in a race thinking my horse would win, and then realizing, suddenly, that it wouldn’t.
I didn’t break down. I didn’t show emotion. I stayed strong.
It didn’t matter the degree of crisis. A crisis was a crisis. And I had to stay strong.
Maybe John Miles had made my decision for me. He had laid out the specifics of my situation in excruciating detail. There was nothing left to be done or discussed. And so it seemed, pragmatically, that my reaction was almost irrelevant. What did it matter how I reacted, or whether I reacted at all? It wouldn’t change a thing. I had been given the irrefutable facts. And the facts of my condition rendered my reaction meaningless.
It wasn’t that I thought he was wrong.
In fact, I knew he was right.
He was dead right.
My memory was wiped out.
Clean slate on a Monday morning.
I couldn’t remember much. Whatever I could remember seemed so recent, and yet so far away. It was all terribly mixed up inside my head; a bizarre amalgam of disparate events that made little sense, even to me. Somehow, in all of them, we – myself, my brothers and sisters, my friends – were all children.
I remembered my brother Michael teaching us to drive the old Anglia Estate around the field. I remembered doing the hay for Miley McElligott and Liam Jones in my summer holidays, bringing it in by donkey and cart. After that, I started doing the hay for Mike Chairman Ryan on a tractor. This was all about four years ago, so I must have been eight years old at the time.
I also had some memories of riding. Everyone said I rode well. The riding memories were much more recent – vivid and fresh in my mind. I had just won the champion jockey’s title, pony racing. I remembered riding many winners for Tommy Walker from Newcastle West. He had a pony with two names. Her name was Daisy, but she was also called Bluebell. Eamon and I would tease her, each standing at one of the two far corners of the stables, one of us shouting ‘Daisy!’, the other shouting ‘Bluebell!’, and watching her turn her pretty head from one side to the other in response to her two names! Another pony I remembered riding a lot of winners on was String of Pearls for Christy Doherty, also from Newcastle West. Paddy Shaughnessy in Galway gave me a lot of winners to take the title. I remembered him, too.
My recollections of riding couldn’t have been from further back than a few days. Or perhaps a few weeks. But not much longer than that. I was just starting to get too heavy for the ponies. I thought Kathleen might win the title from me. But it didn’t make sense because she had just been here, by my bed, a woman. And so were my other brothers and sisters, standing here in this room in front of me, a few minutes ago. And they weren’t children either. And neither was I. We were all fully grown men and women. How could it be?
That was me, mentally.
Physically, I woke up not feeling. Not feeling anything. My arms, my legs, they were numb. Sometimes I could move them, sometimes I couldn’t, but I couldn’t feel them at all. There was my head and my face. Then my torso. And then nothing. I found at times that I could reach out and grab something, while at other times I couldn’t. I couldn’t control when I’d succeed and when I’d fail but, even when I did succeed, it didn’t mean much because I could never feel that something. Hot, cold, pain, nothing. The messages from my brain refused to transmit to my limbs. I couldn’t stand, I couldn’t walk, but finally I could breathe, and I suppose this is when you shake your head and say, ‘What a lucky, lucky man.’
So, of course, Professor Miles was right. And yet I ignored him. From deep within my subconscious, I blocked him out. And with that, in one fell swoop, I blocked out everything that anyone thought was wrong with me.
It wasn’t denial.
It wasn’t madness.
It was self-preservation.
A few minutes after Professor Miles left the room, Joanna and my friends and family came in again to see me. They must have been given instructions not to stay long this time around either, because they had barely spent a few minutes with me when they told me that I needed to rest and they needed to leave. I made a sudden motion then, as if to get off the bed, but of course I couldn’t – the message from my brain couldn’t get to my feet. My sister Geraldine looked at me in horror and said, ‘Declan, what on earth are you doing?’
I said, ‘Hang on, I’m coming with you.’
There I was, wired up, four days recovered from twelve fractures to my skull, and I believed – truly believed – that I was ready to get up and go. There was this trauma I had suffered, but it was as if everybody else was suffering from the trauma, except me. There was something that had happened to me, but it was as if everybody else was seeing what had happened to me, except me. I was fully protected. Some unexplained, inner safety mechanism shielded me from it. I refused to see it. I refused to suffer it.
But I felt it. The burden of it. Of this life after death.
Because you cannot choose not to feel.
You can feel, but choose not to acknowledge.
You can acknowledge, but choose not to act.
But you cannot choose not to feel.
So I felt it. Every mystifying moment of it.
Night and day were the same to me. I slept a lot. Often, too often, I found myself drifting, floating, giving in to the fictitious, pretend sleep of the painkillers. I dreaded this sleep. I had no control of my mind when the drugs took over. I would wake, screaming from the nightmares that tormented me.
But when I woke, I woke happy.
A happy child in my home in Ireland.
Then I would fall asleep again.
And then I would wake.
Happy child. Home. Ireland.
Sleep. Wake. Sleep.
Sometimes, I would fight to stay awake, fight with every last inch of resolve. But mostly, I’d lose. Mostly, I’d give in to whatever the sleep, whatever my drug-induced mind, chose to bring my way.
It was completely whimsical, my mind. It was morbid, it was cheerful; it was out of control. It had a life of its own. It taunted me constantly. I had no concept of what was real and what was imagination; what was fact and what was fantasy. I didn’t know when I was awake and when I was asleep. I didn’t know if I was having dreams or nightmares.
And I didn’t know if the dream was my childhood or if the nightmare was what I was living through.
Kaleidoscope
It was a dream. It was real. It was a dream.
I was twelve and I was ecstatic.
Some time ago, I had been given Roger. Bruce gave him to me, the manager of Kilfrush Stud; gave him to my father, actually. Roger was French. He had been brought over to Ireland by the owners of Kilfrush Stud but he proved such a temperamental pony that neither their daughter nor Bruce’s son Claude wanted him. So Bruce asked my father if one of us kids might like to try riding him.
What first struck me about Roger was his long, uncontrollably wild mane. It was t
hick and knotted, and looked as if it couldn’t ever be tidied up. Many years later, I would go to Hermosa Beach in California while riding trackwork for Charlie Whittingham and, in my muddled-up imagination, I pictured the human equivalent of Roger to be a typical LA ‘surfer dude’ with long blond hair and a free spirit. Roger’s personality mirrored his looks – I loved his eccentricities and his extravagances. And so, with much fanfare, I became the owner of a beautiful chestnut Shetland called Roger.
Eamon, by then, already had his own pony, gifted to him by way of Pat Hogan. The pony had been left with Pat Hogan for safekeeping by his owner – a travelling salesman named Barney Sheehan – when his trailer broke down by Pat Hogan’s yard. The trailer was duly fixed but Barney Sheehan never came back to collect his pony. Thoughtful and considerate as ever, my brother named the pony after his negligent benefactor. Barney was a dark bay pony with a hog mane – obedient, kind, easy to ride, everything you would want in an animal, really.
I discovered quickly that Roger couldn’t have been more different; he truly was the most difficult character you could imagine – you couldn’t even get a bit in his mouth. The moment you walked into the paddock, he would run everywhere, do everything, so as not to let you catch him. And then, when you finally got a hold of him and started to ride him, he would gallop about with a mind of his own, spontaneously stopping, about-turning out of nowhere, going in the opposite direction to where you wanted. I realized that to ride Roger, you had to have your wits about you all the time.
One day, with the fearless optimism of children, Eamon and I decided to tie the two ponies together by their head collars and ride them around the field – Eamon on Barney and me on Roger. We thought that because they were tied together, Roger would be forced to do what Barney was doing, and because Barney would obey our command, the obstinate cheval would have no choice but to follow. So we pointed them both at a stone wall that we intended them to jump over. Lo and behold, when we got to the wall, Roger decided to duck instead of jump, and when he did, he pulled Barney straight down with him. Eamon and I went flying in opposite directions straight off their backs, landing on the ground. It was such a stupidly dangerous thing to do, but we lay on the soft green grass like that for a long time, just laughing our heads off. It would always remain one of the happiest days of my childhood, at one of the happiest times of my life.
It was a dream.
It was a nightmare. It was real. It was a nightmare.
I was twelve and I was hungry.
When I awoke, it was dark. I sat up in bed and rubbed my eyes. I was in our home in Bank Place in the pale-blue-coloured bedroom I shared with my brothers Michael and Eamon. A stray bar of moonlight crept through where the curtains, cut ever so slightly too narrow, wouldn’t quite draw shut. I could make out the faint shapes of Eamon and Michael in their beds, fast asleep, their bodies rising softly with the rhythm of their breath. I was hungry; I decided I wanted a hot, buttered piece of toast.
As gingerly as I could, so as not to wake my sleeping brothers, I crept out of bed and tiptoed across the floor. Michael stirred, and then in a sleepy voice, whispered, ‘Declan, is that you? Can you get me a biscuit?’ before falling straight back to sleep again. I stifled a laugh. Michael was sixteen at the time, four years older than me, and one of the most gifted storytellers you could imagine. Every night, I’d bribe him with biscuits to tell me stories – he’d make them up in his head and come up with new and fantastic ones every time! I wondered what he’d conjure up tonight when I brought him up his biscuits. Smiling to myself, I shut the bedroom door behind me softly. Then, arms outstretched, I groped my way along the corridor wall to the stairway that would take me downstairs to the kitchen. I dared not turn the hallway light on for fear of waking my parents. In any case, my eyes had adjusted to the darkness by now and I could see the landing of the stairs before me.
We had a long, rectangular mirror on the wall facing the stairway, which came into sight about halfway down. I was at about this point that I sleepily rubbed my eyes and, almost by force of habit, looked up at the mirror.
My eyes opened wide in horror.
For the person looking back at me from the mirror wasn’t me.
Only it was me.
But it wasn’t the face of a twelve-year-old child.
It was the face of a man.
It was a man and he looked like me.
It was me and I looked like the man.
Then, suddenly, around my face – the man’s face, the face in the mirror – others appeared. The faces were shapes, an amalgam of ovals and circles, white and distended, with skull-like eye sockets, no noses and round black holes where there should have been mouths. There were several of them in the mirror, floating around. Then, all at once, they seemed to see me, their deep sunken eyes converging in unison on my face in the mirror.
I tried to scream, but my voice had no sound.
I tried to run, but my legs wouldn’t move.
I could only watch, frozen in terror, as the faces started shaking before me, twisted and grotesque, up and down and up and down. The eye sockets became slits, each lipless mouth gaped wide in a hideous O.
They were laughing. Laughing at me. Silently, soundlessly.
Then, the sound came. But it came from me. From the man in the mirror. He opened his mouth. And he screamed and he screamed and he screamed.
It was the shrill shriek of a child.
I sat up in my hospital bed, still screaming uncontrollably, until the nurses came to sedate me.
It was real.
Umbra
Time became an abstraction.
The second hand stalled.
But somehow the minutes rolled into hours, and the hours into days.
Nothing made sense. The hallucinations continued to haunt me. Even when there was daylight, even when I was awake, it didn’t stop, this ever-moving, ever-changing kaleidoscope of images that danced inside my head. I was dizzy from the confusion of it all.
What was real? What was not? And did it even matter?
I tried to keep myself busy to fill the days, to make the time go faster. Until what? I would often wonder. Still, I insisted that my blinds were never drawn, not even at night. And I waited for sunrise every morning, staring out of the hospital window, counting down the minutes, thinking, when the sun finally came up, that somehow I had survived to see a new day.
Some days, I would occupy myself by going through the sack-loads of mail in my name – the hospital had been deluged with cards and letters for me, and a whole army of people were wading through it all. Joanna and her father took the lead on this. They would keep aside some of the get-well cards and the ‘we are praying for you’ letters for me to read myself; the rest they would read aloud to me. But they made sure I was aware of every single missive sent to me by well-wishers; friends and fans alike. I was told later that Robert Park had personally responded on my behalf to everyone who had sent something in. It took him weeks.
Did I mean so much to so many?
One of the most memorable letters I received was from a lady in the Midlands, who wrote to say that she was not a racing fan. But, she continued, she had put her six-year-old son to bed one night and then heard voices in his bedroom. She went in to see who he was speaking to, and apparently he told his mum that he was saying a prayer for Declan Murphy to get better. I had no memory of ever being the man that her little boy was praying for, but it was things like this that gladdened my heart, that made those long, dark days drift by.
Sometimes, I asked different people for their version of what had happened to me at Haydock Park. Since (thankfully?) I remembered none of it, it was like being told a story, each version with its own twist, coloured by the perspective of the storyteller, but all equally fascinating to hear. I listened, amazed, in a state of disbelief. Like I was being told about someone else. Like I was privy to a bit of juicy gossip. Really? I wanted to ask. That actually happened to him? To him? To me …
It seemed that
I had shaken the world slightly by not dying. It is an unusual thing to think about oneself; a ridicule of realism, strangely transcendental. But it did appear that everyone had given up hope so long ago, that my dying wouldn’t have sent as many shockwaves as my not dying. The Racing Post had to pull from publication the headline announcing my death. Instead, the now infamously premature front page was framed and hanging behind the desk of the editor, Alan Byrne, in his Canary Wharf office.
My manager, Marten Julian, had been telephoned and subsequently interviewed by Sky News at 6 p.m. on the day of the accident, all within three hours of my fall – before the body was cold – and told to assume that I was dead. More specifically, and much to his horror, he was advised by the reporter that, when referring to me in the interview, it would be prudent to speak of me in the past tense. Marten claimed that the pressure had been ‘almost unbearable’.
Separately, Barney Curley told me that just going by the accounts of Racing Post journalist Ray Gilpin, who spent every waking moment at the hospital monitoring my progress, he had stacked my odds of living at a 6 or 7/1 chance in a two-horse race. Barney Curley rarely ever lost a gamble in his life, but luckily for me, I suppose, he must have lost his Midas touch on that one occasion. Racing photographer Colin Turner, standing closest to the scene of the fall, had witnessed the horse galloping over my head and said that he had never heard a sound like it in all his professional career, that the ‘sickening thud of hoof hitting helmet’ would regrettably stay with him for ever. Indeed, Eamon told me that Arcot’s owner, American businessman Jim Chromiak, rang him up minutes after the fall and wasted no words. ‘He’s died,’ he told a shell-shocked Eamon on the other end of the phone line. Apparently, I had managed to prove him wrong as well.
I thought it an extraordinary coincidence that the horse that had delivered the final blow to my skull was being ridden by Charlie Swan. I didn’t have any recollection of this, but Charlie told Eamon that we had been standing together in one corner of the weighing room – just he and I – minutes before the start of the race, discussing Ayrton Senna’s untimely death and pondering our own mortality. And then, by a peculiar twist of fate, he happened to be riding the horse that had almost caused me to suffer the same fate as Senna. Honestly, could you make this stuff up if you tried? Of all the possible riders in the race, did it have to be Charlie?
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