Traveling Light

by Bill Barich

  A crowd began to collect. We joined them, clutching carol sheets and pints. The night air was cold, bloody cold, but the sky was clear and seeded with stars. All around us we saw bundled Chardstockians: red noses, watch caps, tweed coats, steamy breath cycling upward. The kids were bouncing around on their toes, punching one another on the arms. Father Christmas was late. There were more whispered speculations about his sobriety. When he arrived at last, shouting “ho-ho-hos,” he looked like a stout Don Quixote, listing to the left in the saddle. His horse was white, and so was his beard. His belly needed no padding. From a sack, he handed out gifts, and the kids squealed and tore paper and compared what they’d got. The carol-singing started. As ever, two or three ringers from the church choir took the lead, and everybody else trailed after them—a junkyard amalgam of broken sopranos and faded tenors. We sang “0 Holy Night,” “Good King Wenceslaus,” and “0 Little Town of Bethlehem.” Irrepressible emotions. The simplicity of the moment, its utter satisfaction, overwhelmed us. Later, we had whiskey, standing among strangers at the bar, but no longer strange to them, or they to us. Then we walked up the hill to our cottage and ate a cold supper. The sheets on the rickety beds were downright frosty, but we managed to generate some heat—lucky, blessed, thankful for favors.

  Farewell to The Fountain. It had to happen sooner or later in the New Year—real life sticking its beak into our affairs. I felt awful to leave London, suffering even before the actual moment of sundering a terrible bout of Burton deprivation—conditioned cells in their infinite craving tossed back on Budweiser or, worse, Coors. Would there ever be a proper pub in the States? Not likely, mate. We still needed to learn some of the hard lessons of history, how to be grateful for little things. A good local keeps your nose pressed to essentials. Its rhythms are circadian, recognizable—this small spot in time where burdens are shared and somehow leavened. Sumerian pharmacists prescribed beer for patients, and so did Egyptian doctors, who included it in fifteen per cent of their potions. Anyhow, the neighborhood grows into your bones: roses dead and living, churches, squares. We felt it in ours, a constant pull as we packed our bags, all sad-eyed and unwilling to contemplate the future. The Sunday bus to Luton airport left at one o’clock, so I ducked out for a final pint and got to the door just as Colin was remembering to unlock it at noon. The Marvin Hagler guy was there, standing next to me, a message from Fate that too much sentiment could be my undoing. You never tip a barman, so instead I gave Colin a bottle of wine. I had one for John, too, and he came around from the saloon bar to accept it. He said he’d put it in his landlord’s basement, where it would have company. He wrote his name and the address of the pub on a slip of paper—John, Cellarman, The Fountain, Amwell and Inglebert Streets, London, EC 1, England. He shook my hand. Would we be coming back? Of course we would. We were always on our way back somewhere, even as arms, legs, bodies stumbled forward. Cheers, John. All the best.

  Jumpers at Kempton Park

  That winter in London, I went to the Kempton Park racecourse whenever I could. Kempton Park is in Sunbury-on-Thames, Middlesex, some fifteen miles west of the city. I always caught a special racecourse train at Waterloo Station. Sometimes classical music was playing through speakers at Waterloo, soaring up into the diesel-rich atmosphere, and it lent a cheery note to departure. The train ticket cost about three dollars and fifty cents. Ordinarily, the compartments on the train were half filled with decorous men who wore a punter’s uniform of topcoat or raincoat and checked woolen cap. They had on ties, of course, because to the English a tie signifies moral purpose. A nation without ties is a lax nation, slightly reprehensible in the eyes of the world. The men did not speak to each other, on pain of death, unless they were old friends, in which case a polite conversation was conducted. Preferred topics were gardening, the weather, and Tory politics. Horses were seldom mentioned. Anybody attempting to pass a tip or otherwise break the meditative calm was a candidate for defenestration.

  That’s why Dorothy Wharton-Wheeler took me by surprise. She sat down opposite me on the train one cold and blustery afternoon and asked me, in a loud voice, which horse I liked in the first race. I told her that I was a bad person to ask, because I was new in the country and I didn’t really know very much about what the English call jumping races, over hurdles or steeplechase fences. These races, taken collectively, constitute the National Hunt season, which runs from midsummer to spring. I had done some research into the history of jumping, I said, and I’d been to Kempton Park a few times, but I didn’t feel qualified to offer an opinion about potential winners, since I had enough trouble spotting them at the flat-racing tracks I frequented in the States.

  “I like Musso in the first,” Mrs. Wharton-Wheeler said.

  I nodded, and went back to reading my racing paper, the Sporting Life. This is a fascinating publication, quite different from the Daily Racing Form. It contains none of the dense statistical material that Americans need to assure themselves that the racing game is not as randomly determined as it often seems to be. The English, with their more highly evolved historical perspective, understand the essential fruitlessness of computer-based scheming, so the Sporting Life sets them a problem in interpretation rather than in mathematics. Its front page always features tabloid-style photographs of horses, along with punning headlines in bold type:

  SANDY LOOKS HANDY

  IT’S ME AGAIN CAN SURPRISE

  BROWN CHAMBERLAIN IS NOT SO GREEN NOW

  Inside, there are race cards, or programs, for all the courses where meetings are being held—at least two every afternoon. The meetings last for a day or two, and they take place at more than forty courses, in England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. The cards list the horses entered in each race, their ages, handicap weights, trainers, owners, and jockeys. The horses’ past performances are described in totally subjective language. There are a few numbers scattered among the lists, but they are straightforward items, lacking the nuance of decimals, so I always made my selections on the basis of unquantifiable factors, like class, fitness, and a horse’s appearance in the paddock.

  According to the Sporting Life, Musso was favored in the first at Kempton Park, although he was expected to receive a strong challenge from Another Generation. I looked over at Mrs. Wharton-Wheeler. She was cleaning her glasses with a tissue. She wore a bulky sweater, a tweed skirt, and no-nonsense nurse shoes. Her hair was cut in a Dutch-boy bob.

  “Have you been to Ascot yet?” she asked.

  I told her that I’d been to Ascot once, in autumn, when the trees along the backstretch were still turning color, and that the races had had a wonderful pastoral quality about them—it was a bit like Thomas Hardy’s novels, with the landscape in the ascendant. I said that I’d hoped to see the Queen at Ascot, or at least Julie Andrews, but I’d been disappointed.

  “The Queen attends Royal Ascot,” Mrs. Wharton-Wheeler said. “That’s an entirely different sort of thing, isn’t it? Upper crust and all that. It’s the Queen Mother who loves jumping. She’s got her own horses. Fulke Walwyn is her trainer.”

  Actually, I’d seen the Queen Mother once, at Newbury. She sat in a glassed-in box near the finish line to watch a horse of hers, Sindebele, run his first race ever. Sindebele fell down while trying to jump a hurdle.

  Mrs. Wharton-Wheeler said that she’d visited twelve racecourses in her life, and she proceeded to recite them to me. Some of the courses were so obscure that their names sounded like the names of forgotten Elizabethan poets—Catterick, Plumpton, Taunton, Towcester. You could imagine these guys sitting at a tavern table and sharing a bottle of hock while couplets rattled around in their brains. Mrs. Wharton-Wheeler laughed at the analogy. She was a former secondary-school teacher, with a degree in literature, and she was familiar with the work of several American poets, including Robert Frost and Allen Ginsberg. A student had given her a copy of Ginsberg’s Howl, back in the terrible sixties. It had not upset her, she said—nasty words were not so bothersome after you’d reached a certain
age.

  Mrs. Wharton-Wheeler told me that she lived in a suburb of London, with her husband, a retired building contractor, who had no interest in racing. “He was born in the city,” she said. “He doesn’t care for country things.” For her, jumping races were a country thing. They reminded her of her childhood, in Devon. She could still remember standing on a hillside on Boxing Day many years ago and watching the local squires ride to hounds, over undulant farmland littered with obstacles—hedgerows, fences, streams. Jumping racecourses—especially those used for steeplechases—simulate these obstacles. Mrs. Wharton-Wheeler saw her first professional jumping race meeting when an uncle took her to Wincanton, in Somerset, just after her sixteenth birthday. It pleased her so much that she began going to jumping races at every opportunity. On her honeymoon, in Scotland, she dragged her husband to the racecourse at Ayr, and he had such an awful time that he vowed never to accompany her again. Since then, he has avoided racing as devoutly as Henchard, the Mayor of Casterbridge, avoided drink, so Mrs. Wharton-Wheeler always travels to the races alone. She survives, she said, by making friends.

  Mrs. Wharton-Wheeler is an anomaly, for jumping has always been a gentleman’s game. It has its roots in the races that eighteenth-century Irish squires used to hold to test the mettle of their hunting stock. Often, the squires chose a village church steeple to mark the finish line—hence the word “steeplechase.” Today, owners of jumping horses need a noble dedication to the sport—and a bank account indifferent to downward fluctuations—in order to participate. Even at the largest courses, the average purse on an average day seldom amounts to more than two thousand dollars. Jumping is a small-scale endeavor, so the temptation to fiddle with horses or to run crippled or indisposed stock is greatly reduced. The laws governing medication are very strict. Anti-inflammatory drugs (like Butazolidin, which props up thousands of near-lame animals in the States) are forbidden, and so are steroids, Lasix for bleeders, and most other chemicals commonly found in a vet’s bag.

  Consequently, jumping horses look good: groomed to perfection, their shiny coats given a high gloss by the eternal damp that passes for winter weather in Britain. The original jumpers in Ireland had no thoroughbred blood, but practically all of today’s jumpers are in a direct line of descent from the three thoroughbred foundation sires who were imported to England in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries—the Byerly Turk and the Darley and Godolphin Arabians. The jumpers are often larger and burlier than other thoroughbreds, with broad chests and muscular hindquarters, which grant them the staying power necessary to complete grueling races that almost never cover less than two miles. They tend to mature rather slowly. The best steeplechasers are between eight and ten years old, and they may run in reasonably decent form until they are twelve or thirteen. Testaments to extreme longevity are not unusual. Mac Vidi, a stolid gelding with the genetic makeup of Bernard Baruch, is still touring courses at the age of sixteen.

  Most jumping horses start out in races over hurdles, where the obstacles—brushy hedges about three and a half feet high—are lower and more resilient than the stiff fences that must be negotiated in steeplechases. The fences at Kempton Park are made of birchwood thatched over with gorse, an evergreen with yellow flowers that grows on moors and heaths; they do not yield to pressure, as hurdles do. A horse that clips a fence with its heels, or jumps too early or too late, or bridles at the severity of the challenge is generally guaranteed to fall. The falls are miserable to watch. Jockeys float into the air, then hit the ground with a bone-cracking thud. If they’re lucky, their mounts don’t land on top of them. Horses come down in an awkward tangle of limbs, but surprisingly few of them are hurt so badly that they have to be destroyed. An inordinate number rise quickly to their feet, shake themselves, and take off again in riderless pursuit of the pack, providing yet another obstacle in the race. It’s the jockeys who seem to suffer most; broken collarbones are a dime a dozen, and so are broken arms and legs.

  Ever since the inception of steeplechasing, there have been outcries about its supposed brutality. One of the sport’s most vehement early opponents was Charles Apperly, known pseudonymously as Nimrod, who wrote about fox-hunting for magazines. It was said of Nimrod that he was always trying to make six words do the work of two. In 1839, he sent an open letter to both the Times and the Standard in an effort to alert the public to the horrors of steeplechasing, but the letter was never printed—because, according to Nimrod, the person charged with delivering it to London disapproved of its contents and burned it. Nimrod did manage, before his death, in 1843, to write about the plight of Grimaldi, a much admired horse whose heart had burst after a steeplechase at St. Albans. He informed his readers that Dr. Wardrop, a noted surgeon, had examined Grimaldi’s heart and had found it to be “of uncommon dimensions, larger than that of Eclipse, but it could not stand steeplechasing,” and “it burst in the moment of victory.

  An unidentified friend of Nimrod’s was even more vociferous in his objections to steeplechasing. “I boldly affirm that it is no criterion of the best horse but a mere game of chance and gambling transaction,” this fellow wrote, in a letter that did get published. “From many quiet and observant farmers I heard the following remark, ‘This is a cruel exhibition, with not one feature to recommend it . . . and if the good sense of Englishmen does not put it down, I hope the Legislature will.’” In response to such ongoing complaints, the Grand National Steeplechase Hunt Committee was formed, in 1866, to govern the affairs of the sport. Most of the committee’s members were also members of the prestigious Jockey Club, and over the years they adopted a stringent body of rules designed to keep mishaps to a minimum. But mishaps will always be part of jumping. It is high-risk racing, exhilarating to watch, and that is one reason that Mrs. Wharton-Wheeler returns to the racecourse again and again.

  Another reason is that Mrs. Wharton-Wheeler loves horses. “I have a strong feeling for animals,” she told me. This does not make her unique in Britain; the English adore their pets. The best-selling author Barbara Woodhouse has a TV show on the BBC called “Barbara’s World of Horses and Ponies.” Barbara trains the horses and ponies by blowing up their noses. I think she may have learned this from an Indian tribe in Argentina. She had another show during which she visited viewers’ homes and gave them advice about their problem dogs. Once, I saw her admonish a slow-moving dog by shaking a plastic bag at it. She even did a special show in Beverly Hills, where she dropped in on celebrities and met their pets. Some of the celebrities were Britt Ekland, Wilfrid Hyde-White, David Soul, and Zsa Zsa Gabor. During the special, Barbara confessed to William Shatner that she knew that when she got to Heaven she’d be reunited with her own dog, who’d died some years before.

  When Mrs. Wharton-Wheeler and I got off the train at Kempton Park, it was less cold outside than it had been in London. A little sunlight was leaking through the haze. This is known in England as “a bright interval.” Ahead of us I could see the main grandstand. It is an imposing brick structure, with the fortress-like look of the nineteenth-century churches, office buildings, and row houses you see all over London. This is orderly architecture, built to withstand the elements and outlast any of its inhabitants. It inspires an inescapable reverence for the past; indeed, nothing in Britain is as sacrosanct as what happened yesterday.

  The original Kempton Manor was owned by Robert, Earl of Mortain. It was mentioned in the Domesday Book, of 1086. Later, the manor was acquired by the Crown, and it remained in royal hands until the Tudor era. In the thirteenth century, Henry III built a hunting lodge there and stocked the woods with deer. The early Plantagenet kings visited Kempton Manor, usually when traveling from Westminster to Windsor, and they probably did some hunting. But the lodge eventually fell into disrepair, and it was dismantled in 1374. Some years later, Elizabeth I leased the manor to William Killigrewe. It was the home of a succession of country gentlemen until S. H. Hyde—a solicitor, a Tory, and a racing buff—acquired the property in the 1870s and worked
a transformation.

  Admission to Kempton Park is very dear, in line with an inflated economy. The cheapest grandstand enclosure, known as the Silver Ring, confines punters to a macadam area almost a half mile from the winning post. It costs three dollars to enter. There is nothing silvery about the Silver Ring. Being there is more like being in purdah, with a veil drawn over your eyes. Mrs. Wharton-Wheeler and I paid about eight dollars apiece to get into Tattersall’s, the middle enclosure—named for Richard Tattersall, who founded one of the first British bloodstock firms, in 1766. The Members’ enclosure, right next to Tattersall’s, is open to non-members willing to part with thirteen dollars. I had spent the thirteen once, just to see who was over there. They looked to me like a bunch of people who were drinking hard in order to forget that they’d overextended themselves in financial matters. Bottles of champagne were making the rounds, and there was a good deal of clubby chitchat going on. The men called each other Nigel or Basil. They had velvet collars on their topcoats and raincoats. Their hats were brown felt, with little snap brims. A few of them had brought their wives along, and the wives sat in clutches at Formica tables in various bars, smoking slow cigarettes and projecting an air of stylish indifference that they must have cultivated at ten thousand boring cocktail parties over the years.