At the time of the race, I was an inexperienced schoolkid – I knew nothing. And on this occasion, my ignorance gave me a strange advantage. I didn’t feel fear – mainly because I didn’t know enough about fear to feel it. And as a result, Mr Turpin felt no fear. We fed off each other – I was calm, so he was calm; he was calm, so I was calm.
And it was with total composure that I held the horse together and, turning into the straight, snuck up Enda Bolger’s inside. I steered Mr Turpin decisively up to the last fence, jumped it, and won.
Later I learnt that Enda Bolger had flat out refused to ride Mr Turpin at Nenagh. Our experiences shape us; they either give us faith or they take it away. Enda Bolger had been clouded by his past experience, something Pat Hogan knew I hadn’t been touched by. He was betting on the fact that I was fresh and enthusiastic, and that the self-confidence I had would transmit to the horse.
It wasn’t until many years later that I heard from Ned Mitchell, whose father Cecil Mitchell’s horse Rich Hill was also running in the race, that he, his father and Pat Hogan had been standing at the first fence, discussing their chances. Given Mr Turpin’s past bad behaviour, Cecil Mitchell had been certain that his own horse would win. But such was the conviction Pat Hogan had in me – in my self-confidence – that I had barely jumped the second fence when he said definitively to the others, ‘I have a right good young jockey riding my horse today – he won’t run out.’
For someone who never wanted to be a jockey, for someone who never thought about it very much, I learnt three invaluable lessons from that experience. One: when you are out there fighting, competing, on a battleground, in a race or for your life, your destiny is your own; you only have yourself to depend on. Two: my rival in that race had tactically tried to expose my inexperience on that horse, but what I lacked in experience, I made up for in belief. And belief would be the rock in my darkest hour. If I believed I could do it, I did it. Three: even the most highly strung of horses can rise to the occasion, but only if they don’t get disillusioned. It is exactly the same with humans.
My first act after emerging from my coma was to get myself out of hospital. I was in unchartered territory with the physical and mental consequences of the surgery, and as supportive as everyone in the hospital had been to me, the environment was adding to the layers of confusion I felt. I didn’t like being looked after. I didn’t like people rushing to my aid when I faltered. I didn’t like the unintended – but unavoidable – looks of pity I got around the clock. I didn’t like being a patient. It spooked me. And just like Mr Turpin, if I was spooked, if I was afraid, I stood in danger of running through the wing of the fence – and not being able to be brought back.
So I had to leave. In my mind, I was in a very happy place in my childhood. In the hospital, I felt naked, vulnerable, exposed. Totally stripped of control. It didn’t fit. It didn’t feel right. Nothing made sense. I wanted to recover, but only if I was not treated like a patient would I stop being a patient.
When I said I wanted to leave the hospital, it came as a huge shock to people. Except for Joanna, everyone else dissuaded me, arguing that I was being premature, that I would not be able to manage on my own outside the fully equipped hospital environment. I was very sick, the doctors said, my recovery would be slow and painful at best. Especially if I left the hospital. In the hospital, where I was being monitored constantly, maybe I would have a chance.
In the end, I convinced them to let me go. But I could not have done it without Joanna, because she was the support vehicle that I so desperately needed. They were right, it wasn’t something I could do on my own. You can take the decision on your own that you aren’t going to accept the situation you are in. You can take the decision on your own not to stay in hospital. But you need someone to support you. And Joanna was the person who supported me. Because she knew what was right for me.
And what was right for me was to be in control of myself. Yes, I had just suffered major trauma. I had undergone brain surgery. I was incapacitated, I was paralysed, I was damaged. But it didn’t change the person I was. At my core, in my DNA, I was a sportsman, and when sportsmen have a goal, they need to achieve it, obsessively and compulsively; it dominates their existence until they do.
I had a goal, and this time it was personal.
My goal was my recovery, and no matter how impossible it seemed, I had to get there. It would be my hardest challenge yet, the ultimate test of injured mind over matter, but I would get there. I had to. I was a jockey – the further away the winning post, the greater the drive to cross it.
I found myself consumed by this, by the desire to go back to being the person I was. And I believed I could only achieve my goal if I was able to put myself in the place I needed to be, in my own head. So the way I did this – the only way I knew how – was to deny there was anything wrong with me. Just like when I was on Mr Turpin, I denied fear, I denied any weakness that threatened to dilute my focus to win, so now, I denied my condition.
But first I needed to be in an environment that allowed me to regain control of my own mind. Which meant leaving the hospital.
In the end, I was only allowed to leave on the proviso that I was accompanied by a fully trained nurse and would be under her constant supervision. This arrangement did not last long either, and I decided I didn’t want the nurse. None of this is meant to sound ungrateful, and try as I may, I cannot explain the reason behind it all, except for the fact that my mind wouldn’t allow somebody else to take care of me. I didn’t want to feel like a sick person. I didn’t want anyone doing things for me. I wanted to be responsible for myself. I wanted to do everything myself. And I wanted Joanna. Joanna was not somebody else; Joanna was an extension of myself.
I wanted to feel normal. With Joanna, I felt normal.
I wanted to feel safe. With Joanna, I felt safe.
So we left the hospital and came home.
But if I was under any illusion that coming home meant that I would miraculously regain so much as a whisper of normality, it was quickly shattered. No sooner than I thought I had it, I lost it.
When I was a little boy, and I wanted something badly, I would close my eyes tight, scrunch up my face and will it to come true. And I truly believed it would. We marvel at the innocence of children, but sometimes, young or old, child or adult, this naiveté is what keeps us going. When you want something so badly, you start to believe it. You forget that dreams are nebulous.
And then you wake up.
I had unmitigatedly underestimated how difficult it was all going to be. Of course, it was what I wanted, and if I had remained at the hospital, I would have never recovered – this much I am certain of. But coming home was a sharp, unrelenting pain. It was home, but I didn’t remember it. I was forcing myself, trying to visualize everything around me as familiar, yet nothing seemed the same. All my things were there, all exactly as they would have been when I left home on the morning of 2 May, but I didn’t remember them. They could have been my things, they could have been anybody’s things, I wouldn’t have known the difference.
I remember looking around my house, this gallery of memories, looking at the framed photos on the walls – various pictures of myself in various races, my winners over the years, my moments of glory. I wanted to feel something when I saw them. Pride at my achievements? Sadness that it had all been taken from me? But I felt nothing. Because I didn’t remember any of it. There it was, lining the walls of my house – my life in a snapshot. And I didn’t remember it.
When Joanna brought me home, I didn’t sleep for twelve nights. I was still heavily medicated and I would fall in and out of consciousness, but it was the restless, disturbed slumber of a restless, disturbed man. I didn’t know the difference between day and night, light and dark. Minutes became hours, then days, then weeks. I wasn’t angry, I wasn’t sad. I was something much worse – I was indifferent. And this is what scared me more than anything else. If I was slowly but steadily descending into a state where I was de
void of emotion, it meant that I was losing control.
One time, my friend and financial adviser Kelvin Summers came to visit me. Joanna and I were renting Bob Champion’s gate lodge in Newmarket at the time. I was sitting in a chair, facing him, but even while he was speaking, I was staring out of the tiny window, looking outside, my mind clearly somewhere else. Kelvin stopped talking then and asked pointedly, ‘Declan, what are you looking at?’
‘The tree,’ I said. ‘It’s my lifeline.’
He got up and peered out of the window to see what I seemed so engrossed in. But a few seconds later, he turned back to face me and, looking puzzled, asked me the same question again. ‘I don’t understand. It’s an oak tree. What are you looking at?’
‘I am looking at the movement of the leaves.’
‘Why are you doing that?’
‘It’s what keeps me going, Kelvin.’
I was a top and I was spinning.
Spinning, spinning, spinning, spinning, spinning …
I sat for days studying that oak tree in the garden, just letting my brain run wild, which is what happens when you dream.
I WILL remember. I WILL walk. I WILL ride.
Will I remember? Will I walk? Will I ride?
I WILL. I WILL. I WILL.
Will I? Will I? Will I?
Listless days. Endless nights.
I didn’t talk. I didn’t shave. I didn’t eat. I didn’t smile. I forgot how to laugh. Sometimes my eyes would slide out of focus and so would my voice – even talking for more than a few minutes left me exhausted. I spent my days asleep or lying in bed or sitting lifelessly in that armchair, numbed by the painkillers, staring at the movement of the leaves.
Sometimes I tried to count the leaves. But after a while I couldn’t, I got confused. You don’t think about it, until you start doing it, but it is a very difficult thing to do … One branch merges into another, you lose count, you start again …
I was drifting rudderless in open waters, a lost soul.
I had no purpose, no meaning. I may as well have died.
And then there was a turning point in my life. And it came, as these things do, in the most unforeseen of ways.
My friend and fellow jockey Ross Campbell came to visit me at the gate lodge. He had been at Haydock Park on the day of my accident in the jockeys’ room when Joanna had tried to call my phone. He hadn’t had the courage, he said, to visit me at the hospital, and so it was the first time he had seen me since that fateful day. I was sitting in my armchair, my body barely filling a third of it, my head half shaven, still heavily bandaged. When he spoke to me, I was able to respond, but my head didn’t move; I had no expression. Then, when he left the room, I heard him speaking to Joanna outside. He was trying to keep his voice low, but I heard two words that triggered something deep inside of me. The two words were ‘never recover’.
This is the thing about pain: you can try to disguise pain, you can try to disguise heartache, but your eyes never lie. If you’ve got pain, it will show in your eyes. I had pain and Ross had seen it in my eyes. Listening to his words, the utter resignation in them, did something to me. It was probably the first time since I had woken from my coma that I started to think that I was different, that something was wrong with me. Because you only see yourself. And I didn’t see myself in that position of despair. But when somebody who knows you sees you and feels a sense of pity for you, loses hope in you, it wakes up something within you. Something that you thought was dead begins to spark life.
People had always remembered me for my intelligence. And with intelligence comes emotion. I knew instantly why I had become emotionless. And I knew what I had to do. The thick fog of confusion that had engulfed me lifted suddenly.
I had been here before – just on the other side …
Francis O’Callaghan, who came from the same village as I did, used to run the quarantine in Ireland for shipping horses to Australia and New Zealand. I would go down to Castletroy on the weekends to help exercise the horses. Essentially, there was a big lunging ring, and the horses were made to run around the circle – on a rope with a head collar – clockwise and then anticlockwise for about twenty minutes each way, to keep them fit and healthy.
The summer of 1980 saw a dramatic new arrival at the stables. A big grey stallion with a dangerous reputation was going to stand in Australia in a few weeks. He had been trained on the Curragh, and his obvious aggression had earned him the nickname of ‘Man-eater’, as well as the need for two handlers at all times, even just to go into the stable, or to be fed.
One Saturday morning, when I had finished lunging all the horses in the first yard, as Francis had asked me to, I decided to make myself useful and work my way down the remaining stables. Eventually, I got to the ‘Man-eater’ and, even from outside, I could hear the restless pounding of his hooves inside the stall. I opened the stable door with the cavesson in my hand, my sole intention being to put it on him, walk him out and lunge him, like I had done with every other horse. Call it my innocence, or my ignorance – whichever you like – but I never stopped to think about the fact that the stallion had always been handled by two people; in fact, my fourteen-year-old brain didn’t so much as process any danger at all.
Predictably, no sooner had I opened the door than the horse made a go at me. Head tossed, mouth open, he reared up aggressively as he saw me approach. I backed away carefully, but right at that moment, I noticed a discarded piece of thick rubber piping, lying on the ground outside the stable door. On a whim, I picked it up and put it in the stallion’s open mouth, swiftly, before he had time to react. Exactly as I had hoped, the moment he bit down on the pipe, I saw a calmness descend over him. I slipped the cavesson on and, leaving the rubber piping in his mouth, I walked him out and started lunging him.
Soon enough, Francis O’Callaghan and a few of the stable lads came around the corner. When they saw me, they ran towards me. Francis screamed, ‘What the fuck are you doing? You’re going to get yourself killed!’
I said quietly, ‘I’m fine, he’s fine, we are both just fine.’
And they stood there in disbelief, watching me, not comprehending what they were witnessing. Nobody, not even experienced trainers, had been able to handle this horse, and there I was, a fourteen-year-old kid, lunging him coolly without so much as a whimper.
When we were finished, I took the stallion back to the stable and, leaving the rubber piping in his mouth, I took the head collar and the cavesson off. Right before I left, I took the pipe out of his mouth, slipped it in my pocket and lo, there he was again, the ‘Man-eater’ in all his snorting rage.
I was at an influential stage of my life – that delicate transitional phase between childhood and adulthood – when perhaps one is able to see things with greater clarity than many adults. I could sense an insecurity in this horse. I didn’t know why he had it, but something was making him afraid. And as is often the way with man or beast, the insecurity was manifesting as aggression. He simply wanted the world to know that he was in charge. And I was saying to him, ‘There’s no need, I’m not going to fight with you.’
I went back to the quarantine yard a few more times subsequent to this event and, with the rubber piping as my aid, I was able to handle the stallion each time without incident.
Eventually, when the quarantine period ended, the horse was due to travel to Shannon Airport to board his flight to Australia. Dave Bartle, chief flying groom of the British Bloodstock Agency, had flown in from England, and was to accompany Francis on the plane. Given my rapport with the horse, Francis asked if I would be willing to take a day off school to come along in the horsebox to the airport and then drop the horse off to his stall on board the plane. I agreed, and that morning I prepared the grey stallion for travel by fitting the rubber pipe in his mouth and tying it to his halter with two pieces of string.
When the horse was safely on board, and before I left the airport that morning, I convinced Dave Bartle that I believed it would be advisable fo
r the rubber pipe to be left in the stallion’s mouth for the duration of the flight. To his credit, he agreed readily, albeit with some amusement at this teenager looking up at him, giving him advice with such surety of mind.
However, I was to learn later that, during the flight, the string on one side of the halter securing the rubber pipe had come undone, leaving the pipe hanging out of the horse’s mouth. One of the grooms had inadvertently removed it, and the horse had lashed out. In turn, the groom had reacted in instinctive anger. Things had come to a head – the stallion had retaliated in fury, swinging his leg out over the top of the stall and trying to kick it down maniacally. Forty thousand feet above the ground, flying over a world without borders, he had become completely delirious and nobody had been able to control him. Ultimately, for the safety of everyone else on board, he became collateral damage. They had no choice. They were forced to put him down.
I tell you this story for a reason.
Yes, I had been able to calm this horse with my rubber pipe, but in essence, what I had done was to lull him into a false sense of security. As long as the rubber pipe was in his mouth, all was well; the minute it came out, the horse reverted to his true state – one of deep-seated insecurity. Even my best efforts to allay his fears, while effective, were but ephemeral. Somewhere, somehow, long before I had met him, his spirit had been irretrievably broken. In the end we failed – we all failed – to save his life.
It is more complicated with man than it is with beast. There is a profound gap that separates us, and that lies in our ability, as human beings, to introspect. We are aware of our existence, beyond a simple recognition of self – we are able to affect our own destinies. We behold the world around us; we evaluate, we admire, we criticize or we simply remain bystanders. And in doing so, we understand our role in the world and we contemplate how we want to belong to it.
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