Rogue Lion Safaris. Simon Barnes
ability with horses. The best of these was the Derby winner he found wandering about on a motorway late at night, having dumped its rider and taken off that morning: how my father, having persuaded the frightened animal to trust him, led it home across country, arriving in the horse’s yard at two in the morning in full evening dress, leading a million pounds’ worth of horse in one hand, an open bottle of champagne in the other, a smouldering cigar in his mouth. In fact, it was not a Derby winner, nor a motorway, and the champagne and cigar were later embellishments. But the story was true, the racehorse was indeed a good one (Falco Spirit, went on to win the Cambridgeshire) and my father was certainly wearing a dinner suit. I know, I was there. I had picked him up after a dinner with one of his owners in Newmarket, and was driving him home. I remember seeing the horse and stopping: and then my father’s calm, matter-of-fact gentleness: ‘All right, me fella, what do you say to a few mints, now?’ Inevitably, he had a packet of Polos in his pocket: you could always tell my father’s movements around the yard by following the minty breath of his horses. Everyone in racing loved the story: well, everyone in racing loved my father. But they never sent him their best horses.
I spent most of my youth being told what a wonderful man he was: he was a genius with horses, a genius with money. How did he manage to run a small business so successfully, and with such style? What was his secret? I didn’t know then, but his secret was that he wasn’t and didn’t. It was something I should have known: and perhaps remedied. But I didn’t.
I finally learned the truth of my father’s business a few days after he died of a heart attack at the races. I took a little comfort in the inevitable witticism that ran through racing at the time: he had dropped dead from the sheer shock of seeing one of his own horses win. This was meant affectionately, on the whole, and I took comfort where I could find it. For I was struck down with grief, which is a kind of madness: a refusal to believe that it was not possible to turn the clock back just a few days: to, say, take over the bookwork, run the business, save the day, romp home a winner. Had I done the bookwork, would he be alive now? I could not bear such a thought, but I kept on thinking it all the same.
To my eternal regret, I was not with him at the races that day. I had been in the middle of my finals at university. I was completing a degree in zoology. My childhood, not lonely but somewhat isolated, had been divided between horses and nature. I had been a bird-watcher, a flower-presser, and a maker of soon dead pets from wild rabbits, hedgehogs and baby birds. I had jars full of beetles and I had watched many moths emerge raggedly from hoarded chrysalises. The first great love of my life was a stoat I had as a pet for a glorious few months, until it escaped. I was an only child in a stableyard set a fair distance from the village: horses, birds and wild beasts peopled my childhood: these, and my affectionate, chaotic father.
I read, of course, incessantly. My early heroes were Mowgli and Dr Dolittle; later heroes were the great interpreters of animal behaviour: Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, Cynthia Moss on elephants, George Schaller on pandas and gorillas, George Sorensen and Peter Norrie on lion. My copy of their book, Lions of the Plains, was nightly perused in wonder, till it became a mass of dog-ears and pencillings. I had a few friends from neighbouring yards; my second great love after the stoat was the daughter of a trainer, a kind and lovely girl of much horsiness: very much my type. Perhaps I would have married her, had I not wanted to go to university.
My father had not exactly approved of my ambition to go to university, but he tolerated it well enough. Tolerating things was his strong point. ‘Horses have got four legs, and if you can count to four, you’ve got enough focken zoology for me,’ he had said, but only because he felt it was expected of him. Besides, I was never a student in the traditional sense of the term, having hundreds of affairs, exploring the far reaches of the universe, plotting global revolution. There was a girl in my second year, but she went off to study epiphytes in the Amazonian rain forest. She was, in a different way, very much my type. Things might have turned out otherwise, but probably not. I was still very much involved with racing and horses. I just did my course work and left for the yard. I would arrive at my provincial university at around noon on Mondays, still smelling of horses after riding out two lots. I would stay in residence until Friday lunch time, and get back to the yard in time for evening stables. I knew very few people outside my tutorial group. University was not a formative experience, it was a sideshow. My real life was bound up with horses: with my father’s horses, our horses. I had never considered the possibility of life without him, or them. And so, at his death, I found myself in free fall, plummeting under the gravity of grief.
My first coherent thought about the future, after I had been summoned from the exams by bad news, was that I would simply take over the running of the yard rather sooner than I had expected. Surely, I thought, it was just a matter of picking up the bookwork; I knew the horse side of things backwards. Without ever thinking the matter out at all clearly, I had envisaged taking an increasingly dominant role at the yard, my father gracefully assuming a back seat. It would be a painless transition, a gradual shift in the emphasis of a partnership that had already worked well for twenty years and more. But like lappet-faced vultures, troubles came down to roost.
I had never bothered much with the business side of stable management. Nor, I soon learned, had my father. There were debts: debts to inspire horror and despair. The yard was so heavily mortgaged it was effectively valueless. Repossession was inevitable. The six horses he – we – I – actually owned had not in fact been paid for. They had to go back. We owed the feed merchant, the farrier, the vet, we owed Weatherbys, we owed several jockeys. We even owed for a couple of horses that we no longer possessed. The wine merchant had not been paid either. This was not a mess, this was disaster. My entire legacy was debt. Solicitors wrote to me in scores, their offices telephoned me hourly. My father’s, our, my solicitor would not let me touch a penny of the estate, such as it was. Practically everyone in racing had a prior claim on it. Including the solicitor himself, as it happened.
Clearing up was, inevitably, a grim business. The owners took their horses away one by one, all with kind words and regrets, none more so than Cynthia, the tearful owner of Darlin’ Girl, who had been a faithful owner and, off and on, a faithful mistress to my intermittently faithful father. The lads were paid off: some grousing, some in tears. I organised a funeral, distractedly: my father had been a sentimental, non-practising Catholic, barring annual drunken forays to midnight mass. The undertaker kept ringing me up to ask unanswerable questions, like how should my father be prepared? What were his favourite hymns? I remembered his drunken improvised hymn of victory one afternoon about a year before, accompanied by a mad jig round the yard with two Tesco bags brimming with tenners. It went something like ‘We’ve stuffed the focken bookie and he’s lost his focken balls’, but perhaps that wouldn’t do. Any bloody hymn. ‘The Lord Is My Shepherd’ is very popular at these occasions, sir. What? Oh yes, the one about the quiet waters by? Yes, sir. Excellent, jolly good. Though neither water nor quiet had ever played a big part in his life. And what should he wear, sir? Plain wooden overcoat, cheapest in the shop. Very good, sir. And what shall I do with his effects? His what? Burn the bloody things. I’m afraid I can’t do that, sir. Will you take delivery of them? All right, all right.
And so I had to sign for this miserable bundle of junk. A large rumpled suit in Prince of Wales check, mud round the turn-ups and a red wine stain over the breast pocket. Brown brogues that needed mending. In the suit pockets keys, Polos. A wallet containing the usual odds and ends. A pair of unusually good race-glasses. A brown racing trilby. My legacy. The rest of the estate was being fought over by my father’s creditors and their solicitors: carrion feeders, hyenas and lappet-faced vultures.
I picked up the wallet: a familiar enough object, enormous, but seldom full, save after the occasional thundering coup against the bookmakers, when wallet, pockets and sometimes carrier bags would overflow with tenners. The wallet contained little of note. I took out the credit cards, and dutifully snipped them in half. There were two twenty-pound notes; these I pocketed, wondering if this was a crime and deciding that it almost certainly was. And there was also an inordinately thick wodge of betting tickets, fat as a pack of cards. I smiled with troubled affection: it was rare for my father to be in possession of entire betting tickets. They were generally ripped asunder and scattered to the four winds as the horses thundered past the post.
And then my heart performed a crash-halt.