Iced

by Felix Francis

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  With my grateful thanks to:

  The St Moritz Tobogganing Club, especially its President, James B. Sunley, to White Turf for their hospitality, to the various racehorse trainers that I spoke to and who would prefer to remain nameless (you know who you are!)

  …and, of course, to Debbie.

  In May 2019, at Ascot Racecourse, an auction was held in aid of the Carers Trust. Susi Ashcroft and Brenda Fenton both bought the right to be included as fictional characters within this book. My thanks go to them, not only for their generosity to the Carers Trust, but also to me for not complaining!

  I love them both really.

  1

  I know I’m in trouble on the run down towards Shuttlecock, but I am laughing – I don’t care.

  I am once again riding in a Grand National, the first time in nearly eight years, but this isn’t the four-and-a-half-mile steeplechase over the thirty fences of Aintree Racecourse. This Grand National is a different type of race altogether – a nerve-jangling, teeth-rattling, buttock-clenching, roller-coaster ride down a three-quarter-mile-long ice chute – the Cresta Run in the Swiss town of St Moritz.

  As I enter Junction Straight I pull myself further forward on my toboggan. Not some sit-up-on wooden-slatted affair for the occasional snowy slopes in your local park, this toboggan is thirty-five kilograms of precision-made steel and carbon fibre, with razor-sharp runners and grab-handles to hang on by.

  Moving my weight forward gives me more speed, and speed is the king. The difference between winning and losing is measured in milliseconds.

  Speed. Speed. Speed.

  Only speed will let you win – provided, of course you don’t have too much, and crash.

  All I can hear is the rushing wind and the constant clatter of the runners on the ice as I hurtle, face down, along the straight at sixty miles per hour, ever gaining that elusive speed on the steep slope. I stare ahead, searching for familiar landmarks, but my vision is blurred by the vibration. I have never been this fast before at this stage of the run.

  I feel rather than see the sharp change in direction as Junction Straight runs into the right-handed Rise where the track even lifts slightly, causing the G-force to squeeze my body onto the sled.

  I flash under Nani’s Bridge and through the kink right at Battledore.

  Next is the infamous Shuttlecock curve, where so many have fallen there is even a special club for them all, and the big question in my mind is: Am I going too fast to make the turn?

  I slide my body back on the toboggan, allowing me some degree of steering by pressing the tail of the inside runner harder onto the ice. But do I also rake?

  On my feet I wear special boots with three jagged metal spikes protruding from the toes – a bit like Rosa Klebb with her poison toe blade in From Russia With Love, only more so. These are my rakes – the only means I have of slowing me down.

  Do I slam the points down onto the ice? Or do I take the chance that I will fly out of the track at Shuttlecock?

  Unlike an Olympic bobsleigh run where the outside walls of the turns are concave, helping to keep the sleigh in the track, many of those on the Cresta are convex, which has the opposite effect. A curling stone released at the top of a bob run will make it to the bottom, but on the Cresta it will slide out at the first corner. Hence, it takes great skill to stay in, and is also deemed to be safer for the out-of-control rider, with so-called ‘soft’ areas of straw and loose snow provided on the outside in an attempt to reduce any injury.

  I compromise.

  I lower my left foot slightly to slow me a fraction and to help with the big ninety-degree left-hand turn.

  As Shuttlecock begins to tighten, I can feel my legs being thrown out to the right into fresh air, so I lean my weight more to the left. I have fallen here before, in previous runs, and I am determined it will not happen again.

  Not now. Not in this race.

  Not in this blue riband event that I have strived so hard to be a part of.

  I lean more to my left, almost further than I dare, and hang on to my toboggan for all I am worth.

  And I am laughing again.

  This is what is meant by living.

  And the Cresta Run has helped save my life – there is no doubt about it.

  * * *

  I was born the year my father, Jim Pussett, was first crowned champion steeplechase jockey, a feat he would repeat six more times before I reached the age of twelve. And it would have been more without a dreadful leg break that kept him out of the saddle for nearly two full years.

  He was my hero, and everyone else’s too.

  When he came back from the injury to win the title again on the last day of the jump season with a treble at Sandown, it was said that grown men cried.

  I know I did.

  And I cried again, four months later, when he died in a car crash on the way to ride at Newton Abbot races in south Devon.

  I was with him in his brand-new, top-of-the-range silver Jaguar sports car on a wet afternoon in August when the vehicle in front of us lost control and careered to the right into the central barrier on the M5 south of Taunton. Just as in his riding, when a horse in front fell, my father took evasive action, swerving his Jaguar left, but I can only imagine that he didn’t see the van on his inside. Perhaps it had been in his rear-view mirror’s blind spot, or maybe the rain had reduced the visibility.

  I shouted a warning from the front passenger seat but it was too late, far too late.

  The collision with the van was relatively slight but it was enough to spin us round through 180 degrees so we were now facing the oncoming traffic in the slow lane – not that anything was going slowly.

  I could see clearly as the fully loaded brick lorry charged straight towards me, its headlights blazing like angry eyes and with smoke belching forth from its locked-up tyres.

  In the very last instant before the impact, my father spun the steering wheel so that the lorry hit broadside on the driver’s door rather than directly front-on on my side.

  This action by my dad probably prevented me from being killed there and then, but it almost certainly sealed his own fate.

  The brick lorry tore into the aluminium side of the Jaguar, ripping through the metal with ease. There was an agonising scream from my father, cut short almost as quickly as it began, and then an awful scraping noise as what was left of the car was rolled onto its side and pushed along the road surface for what seemed like a very long way.

  When all finally went quiet, I remember being quite surprised that I was not only conscious but appeared to be totally unharmed.

  Nothing hurt anywhere but, even so, I was unable to move.

  There were two reasons why I couldn’t get out. First, the door on my side was now lying flat on the ground, and secondly, my father was sitting in my lap, the impact and gravity combined having thrown him across from the driver’s seat into the passenger one.

  I called out to him but there was no reply.

  Even at the age of twelve, I was well acquainted with death.

  My grandparents on my mother’s side were sheep farmers on the North York Moors and, almost as soon as I could walk, I had been helping with the lambing each Easter holiday. The death of a newborn lamb, or a ewe giving birth, may have been a rarity, but over the years I had seen many. As my hard-hearted grandfather always said, it was an irritation but not something to cry over. He, of course,
was more concerned with the erosion of his income.

  And then, there had been the dogs.

  Not just the sheepdogs on the farm but our own family pet dogs, plus cats, hamsters and guinea pigs – they had all come and gone with regularity. Not that I hadn’t grieved over them. I had, with fervour.

  However, I had reached the age of twelve without ever encountering the death of any human being that I knew, and definitely not one as close to me as my own father.

  Nevertheless, I knew he was dead.

  There was something strange about the angle that his head lay on my chest, and his eyes were open and unblinking.

  I remained quite calm and even spoke gently to him, thanking him for taking the impact on his side and explaining to his non-hearing ears that it wouldn’t be long before help came.

  But it took a whole hour for the emergency services to arrive and extract us from the tangled mass of aluminium, all that remained of the Jaguar.

  Two burly firemen finally removed the buckled driver’s door with mechanical cutters and climbed inside. Then they lifted my father off me.

  I was reluctant to let him go, and I clung to him desperately until the firemen forced him from my grasp.

  That passing hour was probably the closest I had felt to my father in all my life. He had always been so busy – rising early to ride horses at morning exercise, then off to the races, before returning home, at best exhausted, at worst battered and bruised. At least six days a week, every week of the year, in the all-consuming passion to be the best, to be the champion.

  Some nights he didn’t come home at all and I quickly learned that hospitals were to be a major part of my young life as I was regularly deposited with friends or neighbours, so that my mother could drive dutifully to the closest A & E to where he’d been riding in order to pick up the pieces.

  She had always hated watching him ride from the grandstands, and her joy at his many victories never outweighed the dread of seeing an ambulance stop next to his prostrate form on the turf. Indeed, she hadn’t been to the races for years, not since the day when he’d had a terrible fall at Newbury, ending up in a local hospital with countless skull fractures and a face so swollen that she’d been unable to distinguish which one of the six patients in the ward was actually her husband.

  After that, she stopped even watching him ride on the television and used to busy herself instead in the garden of our house in Lambourn, forever pruning the already over-pruned rose bushes.

  Maybe it was ironic that what finally robbed her of her spouse was not a steeplechase racing fall as she had always feared, but a road traffic accident from which everyone else emerged unharmed.

  In spite of my protestations to the paramedics that I was absolutely fine, I was fitted with a stiff surgical collar, strapped to a scoop stretcher and airlifted by helicopter to the paediatric trauma centre at Bristol Children’s Hospital.

  I wanted to stay with my father but my pleas to do so fell on deaf ears – looking after the living was their priority – but it was that moment of separation that, for many years, I found most difficult to accept.

  It felt as if I had abandoned him, and no amount of rational argument would convince me otherwise. Not for a long time, anyway.

  CT scans, concussion tests and X-rays at the hospital told everyone else what I already knew, that I was totally uninjured. I demanded to be taken back to my father but, of course, that wasn’t going to happen. Instead, I was placed in a room with a child psychologist who tried to keep me distracted with word games.

  ‘I know my father’s dead,’ I said to her, refusing to play along, ‘but I still want to be with him.’

  Only much later, with the arrival of my tearful mother to collect me, did the enormity of the situation dawn on me – my daddy wasn’t coming home, not on that day nor on any other day.

  Hence my tears flowed incessantly through that night and for many nights to come.

  One’s heroes shouldn’t die. And especially not like that.

  * * *

  Shuttlecock doesn’t claim me, not this time.

  My toboggan fishtails but I am still aboard and streaking through Stream Corner and on to the Bledisloe Straight. Now just the road bridge and the railway bridge to flash under, three slight bends and the Cresta Leap to negotiate, and then on down to the finish.

  Easy-peasy.

  But nothing is easy-peasy at eighty miles per hour with no proper brakes and no seatbelt.

  Eighty miles per hour.

  That was the speed my father had been driving at when the car in front had hit the barrier.

  Suddenly, I am back there on the M5, watching the brick lorry coming inexorably towards me with its headlights blazing, the expression of terror on the driver’s face still etched deep into my memory.

  I shake my head.

  Not now! Not now!

  I am all too aware what is happening to me. This is the regular prelude to a debilitating panic attack when some inner voice in my head tells me that I’m not worthy to be alive when my father is dead.

  ‘No,’ I shout, ‘this will not happen. This will not happen now!’

  I begin to gasp for air, as if I am being smothered, and I can feel the palpitations starting in my chest. My palms become sweaty and I am in danger of losing my grip on the toboggan handles. I shake my head from side to side, trying to will the wicked demon back into its box.

  ‘Not now,’ I repeat, forcing myself to concentrate on the ice ahead.

  I am merely a passenger as I zip under the bridges and on towards the finish.

  And then, all of a sudden, I am over the line and running into the yellow foam mats that stop me careering down into the main square of Celerina, the village at the bottom of the run – and the route to the hospital where, indeed, many a failed Cresta ride has finished before now.

  But I am not one of those needing emergency surgery, not today.

  I lie on the mat, exhausted, still fighting for my breath.

  ‘Hello, hello,’ announces Tower loudly through the Tannoy speaker above my head. ‘Miles Pussett, down in five-two point two-four seconds. That puts him in third place.’

  Somehow, the announcement brings me back from the brink and the palpitations subside. My breathing begins again and life returns to normal.

  But did Tower say Hello, hello?

  That call is reserved only for a rider’s personal-best time.

  Fifty-two point two-four seconds is my personal-best time – and third in the Grand National, no less. But that was only the first run of three.

  I jump up and collect my toboggan ready for the ride back up to the top to do it all again.

  I laugh once more.

  Bring it on.

  2

  My father’s death understandably had a profound effect on all his friends, but especially on my mother and me, their only child.

  His funeral ten days later in the Minster Church of St Michael in Lambourn was attended by all the great and the good of the racing world.

  Even the royal family sent representatives.

  Loudspeakers were set up to relay the service to the many hundreds gathered outside for whom there was no room in the ancient Norman structure, and the route from our house to the church was lined with men with bowed heads and women holding quietened children. TV news cameras covered the arrival of the congregation, the oak coffin and the family.

  Everyone wept.

  Racing itself had come to a standstill, with both the day’s meetings cancelled out of respect.

  My mother, however, was stoic in her loss, smiling wanly at friends and strangers alike. It was almost as if her torment and uncertainty were now over – she would no longer have to sit at home while he rode half a ton of horseflesh at breakneck speeds over huge fences, wondering if he would be coming home tonight.

  Now she knew – he wouldn’t be.

  I, however, felt like a fraud.

  Dressed in a new white shirt and dark suit from the local Marks and Spen
cer children’s department, I was sure everyone was staring at me with the same thoughts: If he hadn’t been in the car, his father would have survived. It’s all his fault.

  I certainly believed it.

  If only I hadn’t insisted on going with him to Newton Abbot on that last weekend of the summer holidays, he would still be alive.

  If only I hadn’t badgered him to stop at the services south of Bristol so I could have an ice cream, we would have been well past the point where the car in front hit the central barrier.

  If only I hadn’t been in the Jaguar with him, he could have let the brick lorry hit the passenger side, and he would have walked away unharmed.

  If only…

  It was actually during his funeral service that my young mind concluded that the best tribute I could give to my father was to become him, to be the next generation of Pussett jockeys, and to be the champion, just as he had been.

  * * *

  My father always told people that ‘Young Miles could ride before he could walk’, and my earliest memories certainly involved ponies, mostly other people’s, which my parents allowed to graze on the paddock behind the house for no rent in exchange for me being able to ride them.

  By the time I was ten, during the school holidays and at weekends, I was regularly riding a pony at the back of the strings of racehorses as they wound their way up for exercise on the Berkshire Downs above Lambourn.

  No one seemed to object, not even the team of men tending the turf gallops, but I was the son of the champion jockey so, even if they did mind, they kept quiet. And, after all, Lester Piggott was riding fully grown Thoroughbreds when aged ten, and he won his first race at Haydock Park at just twelve.

  Lester was obsessive about his riding, continually starving his five-foot-eight-inch frame to remain thirty pounds lighter than its natural weight. And now I too became obsessive, riding whenever and wherever I could. And, when there was no pony available, I would run up onto the Downs to get myself fit, pushing myself harder and harder, even when my lungs and legs complained of the pain.