Frankie: The Autobiography of Frankie Dettori. Frankie Dettori
borrowed a leather jacket with padded shoulders, and then I hit on the idea of smearing print from newspapers on my face to make myself look a bit older. It usually worked, too, though I was turned away once or twice until people got to know me.
Luca Cumani treated me like the little kid I was in those early days. Most of the time he spoke to me in English, but when he was angry with me—which was frequently!—he tended to shout in Italian. It was not that he didn’t care, more that he had bigger fish to fry. At times he could be just like a dictator, very cold and professional. At evening stables he would run his finger along the top of my horse’s back, showing up the dirt on its coat I hadn’t touched, and then give me a bollocking. When I protested that I was too small to reach its back he told me to stand on a bucket. Then he’d come round the next night to check I’d done what he said. I used to call him all sorts of names out of his hearing, but he was a master of his trade and I wasn’t living up to his standards.
One of my early jobs was to groom any horse turned out in the paddock in a metal pen, but as usual I couldn’t reach their backs to brush them. I got round this by using an upturned water bucket to climb on to the horse’s back. Sometimes, just for fun, I’d perch back to front facing its tail. That way I could brush its quarters properly while the horse grazed peacefully under me. I was really pleased with myself at this piece of enterprise—until Luca caught me one day and called me every name under the sun for taking unnecessary risks.
My initial enthusiasm for looking after my horses properly began to wane as Christmas drew near. Instead I developed into a Jack the Lad, a right little rascal. I’d got wise to the way things were done and started to cut corners by ducking out of as much work as possible. I did all the things that apprentices were not allowed to do. Single-handedly I changed the system. Luca would get to hear about it and encourage his senior lads to control me. I was a rebel then and used to upset everbody in the yard. No wonder they picked on me and gave me plenty of whacks, but I still got away with murder.
The job I hated most was having to spend hours on the chaff machine, a huge contraption used for chopping up hay into small bits for the horses. I cut chaff for five years, from fourteen to eighteen, and loathed absolutely every minute of it. When you are small and have already done a day’s work you are usually too knackered to force the handle round, so it used to take me half an hour to fill one bucket full of chaff. And if you loaded the hay too thickly into the machine you couldn’t move the handle.
Eventually I hit on a brilliant plan which saved me hours of toil. I’d climb onto the handle, then jump up and down until it snapped. Each time it broke the kids in the main yard had to cut the chaff for us, too, on their machine. Unfortunately Luca’s handyman usually repaired the damage within a few days. Then it was back to the grindstone for me until I damaged it once more.
If one of the bigger lads picked on me I used to get my own back when he wasn’t looking by flooding one of the boxes he was working in. Two barrels of water in a box of straw or paper takes a lot of clearing up. Flooding boxes was one of my specialities, but because no-one else was daft enough to do something like that, they always identified the culprit and then I’d get another whacking.
Colin and I were lighter than the other apprentices, so we had the task of riding away the youngsters bought by Luca and his owners at the yearling sales late that year, as part of the process of breaking them in and getting them used to a saddle on their back. It was an amusing sideline which almost led to my being placed on the transfer list. It happened when we were caught racing Luca’s yearlings round the paddock at breakneck speed like jockeys in a head to head finish. That was the year that Steve Cauthen and Pat Eddery dominated the jockeys’ championship, so as we rode away the yearlings I played the role of Steve while Colin fancied himself as Pat. First we’d have a trotting race, then another one going a fair bit faster. Of course one thing led to another because our rivalry was so intense. We snatched two branches from the hedge and used them as whips as we tried to imitate our heroes by driving the yearlings ever faster in an imaginary finish.
This carried on for day after day. Sometimes we’d have seven races round the paddock on the same pair, even though we knew that forcing unfurnished youngsters to run faster than was good for them was madness. These were expensive young babies with a big future, and we were treating them as recklessly as dodgem cars at the fairground. By the time we finished they were often covered in sweat with their eyes popping and their flanks heaving. We were asking for trouble and it was only a matter of time before we were spotted by the stud’s head lad. He immediately reported us to Luca—though luckily he didn’t realise that we had been up to the same tricks for days on end.
Luca went ballistic. He was incandescent with rage as he read the riot act to us in his office. I thought he was going to sack us both on the spot, and if he had known the full story he probably would have sent us packing. Instead he threatened me with all sorts of dire punishment if we ever did it again—including a move to the Midlands trainer Reg Hollinshead, who had a reputation for being an even sterner disciplinarian.
After six months at Newmarket, I headed home to Italy for a Christmas break just after my fifteenth birthday. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go. By then my English was picking up quite well, I’d found a family who treated me as one of their own, I had a few pals, and I was starting to have a bit of a life in Newmarket. We’d play snooker in the New Astley Club for pennies, eat a few pancakes and share our accumulators. There was always plenty of laughter—particularly on Saturday nights when we’d all go to the disco, where the rest of the lads would get legless while I stayed on soft drinks, so I often ended up looking after the worst cases. I loved all this nonsense. Life was definitely looking up now that I was coming out of my shell.
Scratching together the air fare to Milan was a bit of a struggle, but Cuthie Suttle came to my aid with a loan of £20—which I repaid by post since I was half expecting to be sent to work for the trainer Patrick Biancone in France in the New Year as the next stage of my dad’s Grand Plan for Lanfranco. But Luca must have seen enough to want to keep me, so soon I was on my way back in January to the coldest winter I have ever endured. It was so bleak, particularly in February, that Newmarket felt like Siberia. Jump racing came to a halt for a month because of the state of the tracks, and most of the time we were restricted to trotting endlessly round Luca’s indoor riding school.
Working in those conditions was horrible. However many layers of clothes we wore we were still frozen to the bone as soon as we stepped outside. Because every penny counted for Val at my digs, she frequently complained about the cost of electricity in her house. Maybe she didn’t realise that I had an electric blanket and a heater going full blast in my room all the time. Ever since then I’ve managed to slip away to the sunshine for part of the winter at least. It’s the only way I can stay sane.
To help keep warm in the sub-zero temperatures, my mates and I used to spend all afternoon in the betting shop. Horses, greyhounds, boxing and soccer—I gambled on them all. The horseracing was cancelled in February and early March, so then I became quite an expert on the dogs. I always went for trap 1 or trap 6 and—against all the rules—I tried to delay handing over my betting slip until I’d seen if my selection had jumped well out of the traps. If it missed the break I walked away without having a bet.
The weather improved enough for horseracing to restart later in March, and I’ll never forget the day I backed the great mare Dawn Run to win jump racing’s top chase, the Cheltenham Gold Cup. Small patches of snow still lay infield and the grass at Cheltenham was scorched brown by the frost. The odds about Dawn Run were just under 2-1 and I had £50 on her nose—which was a decent bet for me. We all watched the race on a big screen at the New Astley Club near the betting shop, and the style of her victory moved me in a way that no other jumping race has ever done. She just refused to give in when all hope seemed gone and fought back like a tigress on the final testing hill to take the prize. It was beautiful to watch.
That was the first time I cried over a horse race and I haven’t seen one like it since. I rushed out of the club into the cold outside with tears pouring down my face, jumped on my bike to return to work, and was still crying when I got there five minutes later.
Some time before Christmas, George Dunwoody confided during one of our many chats that his son Richard was convinced