by Dick Francis
At the slightest sign of shirking Humber would dish out irritating little punishments and roar in an acid voice that he paid extra wages for extra work, and anyone who didn’t like it could leave. As everyone was there because better stables would not risk employing them, leaving Humber’s automatically meant leaving racing altogether. And taking whatever they knew about the place with them. It was very very neat.
My companions in this hell hole were neither friendly nor likeable. The best of them was the nearly half-witted boy I had seen at Stafford on Boxing Day. His name was Jerry, and he came in for a lot of physical abuse because he was slower and more stupid than anyone else.
Two of the others had been to prison and their outlook on life made Soupy Tarleton look like a Sunday-school favourite. It was from one of these, Jimmy, that I had had to wrench my blankets and from the other, a thickset tough called Charlie, my pillow. They were the two bullies of the bunch, and in addition to the free use they made of their boots, they could always be relied upon to tell lying tales and wriggle themselves out of trouble, seeing to it that someone else was punished in their stead.
Reggie was a food stealer. Thin, white faced, and with a twitch in his left eyelid, he had long prehensile hands which could whisk the bread off your plate faster than the eye could follow. I lost a lot of my meagre rations to him before I caught him at it, and it always remained a mystery why, when he managed to eat more than anyone else, he stayed the thinnest.
One of the lads was deaf. He told me phlegmatically in a toneless mumble that his dad had done it when he was little, giving him a few clips too many over the ear-holes. His name was Bert, and as he occasionally wet himself in bed, he smelled appalling.
The seventh, Geoff, had been there longest, and even after ten weeks never spoke of leaving. He had a habit of looking furtively over his shoulder, and any mention by Jimmy or Charlie about their prison experiences brought him close to tears, so that I came to the conclusion that he had committed some crime and was terrified of being found out. I supposed ten weeks at Humber’s might be preferable to jail, but it was debatable.
They knew all about me from the head travelling lad, Jud Wilson. My general dishonesty they took entirely for granted, but they thought I was lucky to have got off without going inside if it was true about October’s daughter, and they sniggered about it unendingly, and made merciless obscene jibes that hit their target all too often.
I found their constant closeness a trial, the food disgusting, the work exhausting, the beds relentless, and the cold unspeakable. All of which rather roughly taught me that my life in Australia had been soft and easy, even when I thought it most demanding.
Before I went to Humber’s I had wondered why anyone should be foolish enough to pay training fees to a patently unsuccessful trainer, but I gradually found out. The yard itself, for one thing, was a surprise. From the appearance of the horses at race meetings one would have expected their home surroundings to be weedy gravel, broken-hinged boxes and flaked-off paint: but in fact the yard was trim and prosperous looking, and was kept that way by the lads, who never had time off in the afternoons. This glossy window-dressing cost Humber nothing but an occasional gallon of paint and a certain amount of slave driving.
His manner with the owners who sometimes arrived for a look round was authoritative and persuasive, and his fees, I later discovered, were lower than anyone else’s, which attracted more custom than he would otherwise have had. In addition some of the horses in the yard were not racehorses at all, but hunters at livery, for whose board, lodging and exercise he received substantial sums without the responsibility of having to train them.
I learned from the other lads that only seven of the stable’s inmates had raced at all that season, but that those seven had been hard worked, with an average of a race each every ten days. There had been one winner, two seconds and a third, among them.
None of those seven was in my care. I had been allotted to a quartet consisting of two racehorses which belonged, as far as I could make out, to Humber himself, and two hunters. The two racehorses were bays, about seven years old; one of them had a sweet mouth and no speed and the other a useful sprint over schooling fences but a churlish nature. I pressed Cass, the head lad, to tell me their names, and he said they were Dobbin and Sooty. These unraceman-like names were not to be found in the form book, nor in Humber’s list in ‘Horses in Training’; and it seemed to me highly probable that Rudyard, Superman, Charcoal and the rest had all spent their short periods in the yard under similar uninformative pseudonyms.
A lad who had gone out of racing would never connect the Dobbin or Sooty he had once looked after with the Rudyard who won a race for another trainer two years later.
But why, why did he win two years later? About that, I was as ignorant as ever.
The cold weather came and gripped, and stayed. But nothing, the other lads said, could be as bad as the fearsome winter before; and I reflected that in that January and February I had been sweltering under the midsummer sun. I wondered how Belinda and Helen and Phillip were enjoying their long vacation, and what they would think if they could see me in my dirty down-trodden sub-existence, and what the men would think, to see their employer brought so low. It amused me a good deal to imagine it: and it not only helped the tedious hours to pass more quickly, but kept me from losing my own inner identity.
As the days of drudgery mounted up I began to wonder if anyone who embarked on so radical a masquerade really knew what he was doing.
Expression, speech and movement had to be unremittingly schooled into a convincing show of uncouth dullness. I worked in a slovenly fashion and rode, with a pang, like a mutton-fisted clod; but as time passed all these deceptions became easier. If one pretended long enough to be a wreck, did one finally become one, I wondered. And if one stripped oneself continuously of all human dignity would one in the end be unaware of its absence? I hoped the question would remain academic: and as long as I could have a quiet laugh at myself now and then, I supposed I was safe enough.
My belief that after three months in the yard a lad was given every encouragement to leave was amply borne out by what happened to Geoff Smith.
Humber never rode out to exercise with his horses, but drove in a van to the gallops to watch them work, and returned to the yard while they were still walking back to have a poke round to see what had been done and not done.
One morning, when we went in with the second lot, Humber was standing in the centre of the yard radiating his frequent displeasure.
‘You, Smith, and you, Roke, put those horses in their boxes and come here.’
We did so.
‘Roke.’
‘Sir.’
‘The mangers of all your four horses are in a disgusting state. Clean them up.’
‘Yes, sir,’
‘And to teach you to be more thorough in future you will get up at five-thirty for the next week.’
‘Sir.’
I sighed inwardly, but this was to me one of his more acceptable forms of pinprick punishment, since I didn’t particularly mind getting up early. It entailed merely standing in the middle of the yard for over an hour, doing nothing. Dark, cold and boring. I don’t think he slept much himself. His bedroom window faced down the yard, and he always knew if one were not standing outside by twenty to six, and shining a torch to prove it.
‘And as for you.’ He looked at Geoff with calculation. ‘The floor of number seven is caked with dirt. You’ll clean out the straw and scrub the floor with disinfectant before you get your dinner.’
‘But sir,’ protested Geoff incautiously, ‘if I don’t go in for dinner with the others, they won’t leave me any.’
‘You should have thought of that before, and done your work properly in the first place. I pay half as much again as any other trainer would, and I expect value for it. You will do as you are told.’
‘But, sir,’ whined Geoff, knowing that if he missed his main meal he would go very hungry, ‘Can
’t I do it this afternoon?’
Humber casually slid his walking stick through his hand until he was holding it at the bottom. Then he swing his arm and savagely cracked the knobbed handle across Geoff’s thigh.
Geoff yelped and rubbed his leg.
‘Before dinner,’ remarked Humber: and walked away, leaning on his stick.
Geoff missed his share of the watery half-stewed lumps of mutton, and came in panting to see the last of the bread-and-suet pudding spooned into Charlie’s trap-like mouth.
‘You bloody sods,’ he yelled miserably, ‘You bloody lot of sods.’
He stuck it for a whole week. He stood six more heavy blows on various parts of his body, and missed his dinner three more times, and his breakfast twice, and his supper once. Long before the end of it he was in tears, but he didn’t want to leave.
After five days Cass came into the kitchen at breakfast and told Geoff, ‘The boss has taken against you, I’m afraid. You won’t ever do anything right for him again from now on. Best thing you can do, and I’m telling you for your own good, mind, is to find a job somewhere else. The boss gets these fits now and then when one of the lads can’t do anything right, and no one can change him when he gets going. You can work until you’re blue in the face, but he won’t take to you any more. You don’t want to get yourself bashed up any more, now do you? All I’m telling you is that if you stay here you’ll find that what has happened so far is only the beginning. See? I’m only telling you for your own good.’
Even so, it was two more days before Geoff painfully packed his old army kit bag and sniffed his way off the premises.
A weedy boy arrived the next morning as a replacement, but he only stayed three days as Jimmy stole his blankets before he came and he was not strong enough to get them back. He moaned piteously through two freezing nights, and was gone before the third.
The next morning, before breakfast, it was Jimmy himself who collected a crack from the stick.
He came in late and cursing and snatched a chunk of bread out of Jerry’s hand.
‘Where’s my bloody breakfast?’
We had eaten it, of course.
‘Well,’ he said, glaring at us. ‘you can do my ruddy horses, as well. I’m off. I’m not bloody well staying here. This is worse than doing bird. You won’t catch me staying here to be swiped at, I’ll tell you that.’
Reggie said, ‘Why don’t you complain?’
‘Who to?’
‘Well… the bluebottles.’
‘Are you out of your mind?’ said Jimmy in amazement. ‘You’re a bloody nit, that’s what you are. Can you see me, with my form, going into the cop house and saying I got a complaint to make about my employer, he hit me with his walking stick? For a start, they’d laugh. They’d laugh their bleeding heads off. And then what? Supposing they come here and asked Cass if he’s seen anyone getting the rough end of it? Well, I’ll tell you, that Cass wants to keep his cushy job. Oh no, he’d say, I ain’t seen nothing. Mr Humber, he’s a nice kind gentleman with a heart of gold, and what can you expect from an ex-con but a pack of bull? Don’t ruddy well make me laugh. I’m off, and if the rest of you’ve got any sense, you’ll be out of it too.’
No one, however, took his advice.
I found out from Charlie that Jimmy had been there two weeks longer than he, which made it, he thought, about eleven weeks.
As Jimmy strode defiantly out of the yard I went rather thoughtfully about my business. Eleven weeks, twelve at the most, before Humber’s arm started swinging. I had been there already three: which left me a maximum of nine more in which to discover how he managed the doping. It wasn’t that I couldn’t probably last out as long as Geoff if it came to the point, but that if I hadn’t uncovered Humber’s method before he focused his attention on getting rid of me, I had very little chance of doing it afterwards.
Three weeks, I thought, and I had found out nothing at all except that I wanted to leave as soon as possible.
Two lads came to take Geoff’s and Jimmy’s places, a tall boy called Lenny who had been to Borstal and was proud of it, and Cecil, a far-gone alcoholic of about thirty-five. He had, he told us, been kicked out of half the stables in England because he couldn’t keep his hands off the bottle. I don’t know where he got the liquor from or how he managed to hide it, but he was certainly three parts drunk every day by four o’clock, and snored in a paralytic stupor every night.
Life, if you could call it that, went on.
All the lads seemed to have a good reason for having to earn the extra wages Humber paid. Lenny was repaying some money he had stolen from another employer, Charlie had a wife somewhere drawing maintenance, Cecil drank, Reggie was a compulsive saver, and Humber sent Jerry’s money straight off to his parents. Jerry was proud of being able to help them.
I had let Jud Wilson and Cass know that I badly needed to earn sixteen pounds a week because I had fallen behind on hire purchase payments on the motor-cycle, and this also gave me an obvious reason for needing to spend some time in the Posset post office on Saturday afternoons.
Public transport from the stables to Posset, a large village a mile and a half away, did not exist. Cass and Jud Wilson both had cars, but would give no lifts. My motor-cycle was the only other transport available, but to the lads’ fluently expressed disgust I refused to use it on the frosty snow-strewn roads for trips down to the pub in the evenings. As a result we hardly ever went to Posset except on the two hours we had off on Saturday afternoons, and also on Sunday evenings, when after a slightly less relentless day’s work everyone had enough energy left to walk for their beer.
On Saturdays I unwrapped the motor-cycle from its thick plastic cocoon and set off to Posset with Jerry perched ecstatically on the pillion. I always took poor simple-minded Jerry because he got the worst of everything throughout the week; and we quickly fell into a routine. First we went to the post office for me to post off my imaginary hire purchase. Instead, leaning on the shelf among the telegram forms and scraps of pink blotting paper, I wrote each week a report to October, making sure that no one from the stables looked over my shoulder. Replies, if any, I collected, read, and tore up over the litter basket.
Jerry accepted without question that I would be at least a quarter of an hour in the post office, and spent the time unsuspiciously at the other end of the shop inspecting the stock in the toy department. Twice he bought a big friction-drive car and played with it, until it broke, on the dormitory floor: and every week he bought a children’s fourpenny comic, over whose picture strips he giggled contentedly for the next few days. He couldn’t read a word, and often asked me to explain the captions, so that I became intimately acquainted with the doings of Micky the Monkey and Flip McCoy.
Leaving the post office we climbed back on to the motor-cycle and rode two hundred yards down the street to have tea. This ritual took place in a square bare café with margarine coloured walls, cold lighting, and messy table tops. For decoration there were pepsi-cola advertisements, and for service a bored looking girl with no stockings and mousy hair piled into a matted, wispy mountain on top of her head.
None of this mattered. Jerry and I ordered and ate with indescribable enjoyment a heap of lamb chops, fried eggs, flabby chips and bright green peas. Charlie and the others were to be seen doing the same at adjoining tables. The girl knew where we came from, and looked down on us, as her father owned the café
On our way out Jerry and I packed our pockets with bars of chocolate to supplement Humber’s food, a hoard which lasted each week exactly as long as it took Reggie to find it.
By five o’clock we were back in the yard, the motorcycle wrapped up again, the week’s highlight nothing but a memory and a belch, the next seven days stretching drearily ahead.
There were hours, in that life, in which to think. Hours of trotting the horses round and round a straw track in a frozen field, hours brushing the dust out of their coats, hours cleaning the muck out of their boxes and carrying their water and hay,
hours lying awake at night listening to the stamp of the horses below and the snores and mumblings from the row of beds.
Over and over again I thought my way through all I had seen or read or heard since I came to England: and what emerged as most significant was the performance of Superman at Stafford. He had been doped: he was the twelfth of the series: but he had not won.
Eventually I changed the order of these thoughts. He had been doped, and he had not won; but was he, after all, the twelfth of the series? He might be the thirteenth, the fourteenth… there might have been others who had come to grief.
On my third Saturday, when I had been at Humber’s just over a fortnight, I wrote asking October to look out the newspaper cutting which Tommy Stapleton had kept, about a horse going berserk and killing a woman in the paddock at Cartmel races. I asked him to check the horse’s history.
A week later I read his typewritten reply.
‘Old Etonian, destroyed at Cartmel, Lancashire, at Whitsun this year, spent the previous November and December in Humber’s yard. Humber claimed him in a selling race, and sold him again at Leicester sales seven weeks later.
‘But: Old Etonian went berserk in the parade ring before the race; he was due to run in a handicap, not a seller; and the run-in at Cartmel is short. None of these facts conform to the pattern of the others.
‘Dope tests were made on Old Etonian, but proved negative.
‘No one could explain why he behaved as he did.’
Tommy Stapleton, I thought, must have had an idea, or he would not have cut out the report, yet he could not have been sure enough to act on it without checking up. And checking up had killed him. There could be no more doubt of it.
I tore up the paper and took Jerry along to the café, more conscious than usual of the danger breathing down my neck. It didn’t, however, spoil my appetite for the only edible meal of the week.
At supper a few days later, in the lull before Charlie turned on his transistor radio for the usual evening of pops from Luxemburg (which I had grown to enjoy) I steered the conversation round to Cartmel races. What, I wanted to know, were they like?
