Rolf’s Ramblings
Life’s all about priorities but in Highclere we’ve had some tough experiences in the last few weeks that will almost certainly never, in such profusion, happen again.
‘Months of Agony, Moments of Bliss’ was the autobiography of ‘old school’ Hampshire trainer, the late Bill Wightman. Hugely respected, Bill was better than ‘middle-of-the-road’ trainer but robbed of his biggest, what could have been life-changing, moments of glory. His great Ascot Gold Cup hope, Kingsfold was killed just before the race and Bill was underbidder for a 3000 guineas yearling who turned out to be the Two Thousand Guineas winner Nearula. To rub it in both events were in Coronation year 1953.
Too many of us know similar heartbreak. So we think we’re in control where our horses are concerned and then excruciating reality hits us squarely in the bread basket (pit of the stomach). The ‘pits’ were plumbed by what one heartless reporter described as a “mishap” – the catastrophic injury, on her Devon & Exeter debut, to a mare of mine, my wife and my mother-in-law. With Highclere, in an oh-so-short span the count is three ‘damaged’ and now it is up to veterinary expertise to restore Centigrade, Antipodes and Merchant. They were horses ‘to go to war with’.
The other morning I was listening to the ‘Reunion ‘on Radio 4. It’s a series where teams of actors, broadcasters, sports are brought together to relive past glories. This one was about Michael Murpurgo’s ‘War Horse’. When the book was first published (1982) nobody took any notice. The equine hero, ‘Joey’, was obstreperous in his youth but we weren’t told whether the colt was gelded, down on the Devon farm where he was born.
When the 1914-18 war was declared he was ‘called up’ – as were millions of horses. Mass million audiences have been ‘called up’ to attend the stage show which opened in 2007 and the film in 2012. Awards were teemed on both productions. And the book took off too.
A hapless critic dubbed the movie ‘Black Beauty goes to War’: he missed the point. Joey suffers injuries that a racehorse very rarely endures – he was caught in the barb wire on the Western Front. He survives – because he is a puppet, a marionette operated on stage by three men. But such is the mesmeric quality of this trompe l’oeil that every audience suspends belief that this woven basket, a work of genius, isn’t equine flesh and blood. Joey first stole hearts and minds at the National Theatre eighteen years ago. The production is touring to great acclaim again.
We sometimes feel we are the puppets in our relationship with horses. Their strengths embolden us; their frailties are sometimes beyond our ability to cope with the constant chapters of triumph and disaster. They are animals whose sense of self-preservation is in short supply: Sir Mark Prescott on training racehorses - “My job is to stop them killing themselves”.
We trained a horse, Banville Lad who, on his debut at Exeter, led his field a merry dance and was a distance clear at the last. He fell. A distant pursuer, Des (no relation to Dessie) passed our fallen hero, at which point our jockey, Richard Linley as thoughtful and considerate a horseman who ever raised his whip, vaulted into the saddle and with no time to regain his irons, urged Banville Lad up to win. Our gelding went to Newbury, favourite, and ploughed a hole in the open ditch that the whole field could have walked through, had he not been prone on the other side.
But Banville Lad got up, living to fight another day, and was rewarded with a holiday in fields nearby his stable in Hampshire. Not long after, news came through that he had tried to jump a hedge and killed himself. The sanguine verdict came from the trainer. “For once he found a leg, and broke it”. (nb ‘find a leg’ – horse righting itself from a mistake).
Mordant humour? When you think that Ryan Moore and Lucy Bronze had cracked bones in their legs while the latter was winning the European Women’s Cup for England, and Moore riding Group One winners for his Coolmore bosses, yet the only salvation for a horse in a similar situation is to insert screws, and pray the injury doesn’t cause arthritis in the joint – which is terminal. The period off games depends on the horse’s healing propensity. Mill Reef was saved – for stud: I have it on good authority that others have come back - and won races, one in particular, Albert Bridge, despite having “more metal in him than Evel Knievel”.
Nobody in racing history, and mine goes back far enough, has ever seen three such talented horses in the same colours as Merchant, Antipodes and Centigrade within such a short period of time have their careers threatened by quite similar leg injuries. The losses in ‘might-have-beens’ of invaluable property are already colossal. All had won their previous races, in Merchant’s case his last three. And the horses they beat before their misadventures all won next time out!
“I quote others to make me better understood” wrote a sage (Montaigne). I quote others because they’ve said it better than I could: this poem about retired racehorses will strike a chord with many of you. Hopefully that chord is one of comfort.
At Grass by Philip Larkin
The eye can hardly pick them out
From the cold shade they shelter in,
Till wind distresses tail and main;
Then one crops grass, and moves about
- The other seeming to look on -
And stands anonymous again
Yet fifteen years ago, perhaps
Two dozen distances surficed
To fable them: faint afternoons
Of Cups and Stakes and Handicaps,
Whereby their names were artificed
To inlay faded, classic Junes -
Silks at the start: against the sky
Numbers and parasols: outside,
Squadrons of empty cars, and heat,
And littered grass : then the long cry
Hanging unhushed till it subside
To stop-press columns on the street.
Do memories plague their ears like flies?
They shake their heads. Dusk brims the shadows.
Summer by summer all stole away,
The starting-gates, the crowd and cries -
All but the unmolesting meadows.
Almanacked, their names live; they
Have slipped their names, and stand at ease,
Or gallop for what must be joy,
And not a fieldglass sees them home,
Or curious stop-watch prophesies:
Only the grooms, and the grooms boy,
With bridles in the evening come.
All that can be done on behalf of fallen horse heroes will be done. Everything is in the lap of the gods.