Gradually the weight came off and, by the morning of the race, I was just nine-stone-three, stripped. That now left a seven-pound leeway for everything else that must be weighed. I could cope with that if I used my father’s old lightweight saddle. But not eating enough food didn’t do much for my energy levels and left me feeling listless and tired. So much so that, when I went to Catterick races on the day with the trainer in his car, it was as much as I could do not to fall asleep during the journey.
It was my very first battle against weight in a war that I would have to wage relentlessly for the next five years.
At least I didn’t disgrace myself in the race, finishing a close fourth behind the winning favourite, and the trainer seemed quite pleased with my performance. So much so that he entered me for another hurdle race at Newcastle the following month.
My career as a jump jockey was finally under way. Now all I had to do was become the champion.
5
‘Hard luck. You nearly made it round Shuttlecock. I really thought you might win the whole thing.’
I am back in the Cresta clubhouse bar after my fall, socialising with some of the other club members prior to us going for the traditional post-Grand National lunch and prize-giving on the terrace of the Kulm Hotel.
In spite of my helmet, the snow and ice had been forced up into my face during my fall and I have a split lip. But I’ve had worse, much worse, on a racetrack.
‘Maybe next year,’ I say.
It’s been a long time since I was prepared to think of anything far beyond my next meal, let alone a whole year away.
* * *
At Newcastle, I had my first racing fall when my mount tripped over the third flight of hurdles and went down nose first onto the turf, taking me with him.
I rubbed the bruise on my left shoulder and felt like a proper jump jockey.
‘Never mind,’ said the trainer. ‘You’re both fine so we’ll try again soon. In the meantime, you can help with teaching the novices to jump.’
It was another small but significant step on my career ladder.
‘I want to leave school,’ I said to my mother that night. ‘What good are A levels to a jockey? I’m old enough to leave, and I want to concentrate on my riding.’
‘Over my dead body,’ she replied. ‘You need an education to get a proper job.’
‘Being a jockey is a proper job,’ I retorted.
It was the full extent of our usual conversation, often repeated, mostly at maximum volume.
And, in the end, I did leave school over her dead body.
Life for my mother had not been easy in the years since the death of my father. He had made a very good living as a jockey but his extravagant lifestyle and his penchant for expensive fast cars, together with his long injury lay-off and some speculative hotel investments that had gone wrong, had all made a huge hole in the family finances.
After he died, my mother discovered that he had also taken out a second mortgage on their house and there was precious little equity remaining for her after its sale. So she had left all her friends behind in Lambourn to move somewhere cheaper, as well as to be nearer to her parents and her elder brother, who was slowly taking over the running of the family farm from his father.
Soon after we moved, Mum had found work as an ingredients mixer in a local food factory, making ready-meals for the supermarkets. In spite of her long hours, it didn’t pay well enough for us to afford the basics, let alone any luxuries. The rent on the house was our main expense and gradually, and unbeknown to me, at the time, she was falling into arrears with our landlord.
Some nights, I would lie in bed and hear her sobbing, the thin wall between our bedrooms doing little to dampen her cries. But, in my seventeen-year-old foolishness, I would not go and comfort her. I simply and irrationally concluded that, if she hadn’t been so stubborn about me leaving school to become a professional jockey, I’d have been able to help.
So it was all her own fault.
Perhaps she was good at hiding the depth of her unhappiness or, maybe, as a teenage boy far more interested in horses than in people, I just didn’t see the disaster that was looming.
One Friday I came home, excited, as always, that school was over for another week. I let myself into the house using my front-door key. Mum worked until seven most nights but she tried to finish a little earlier on Fridays. Then, she would always bring home two ready-meals from the factory for us to ‘taste’. I didn’t ask if this was official company policy or if she had simply purloined them by hiding them in her voluminous handbag. I expect the latter, as they were usually missing the outer printed sleeve that would have told me what they actually contained. But that would have spoiled the ‘guess the ingredients’ game my mother always insisted we played.
This particular Friday, however, I was surprised to see her overcoat already hanging on the hook near the front door. And it was only four o’clock.
I called out to her but there was no reply.
How strange, I thought. Surely she hadn’t gone to work without her coat. Not in February. It was near freezing outside and she had to walk the half-mile to and from the factory.
I called her again, but still no reply.
I shrugged my shoulders and went up to my bedroom to change out of my school uniform into my working clothes, before going to help with evening stables at the yard.
As I climbed the stairs, I noticed that the light was on in my mother’s bedroom.
That was strange too. She was most meticulous at always turning off everything electrical when it was not needed, to save money. She even switched the TV off at the mains, claiming that stand-by mode was simply a conspiracy by the power companies to increase their profits.
I’d left for school at seven, well before it was light, making a detour, as always, to the racing stables to watch the first lot going out. Even if I couldn’t actually ride on a school day, I still wanted to be involved.
Mum usually left home at seven forty-five, ready for her eight o’clock shift at the factory. She must have left the light on by mistake.
I went into her room to turn it off.
She lay on her bed, face down, still wearing her dressing gown as I had seen her that morning. But nothing else was the same, and never would be again.
I called out to her without any response.
Her left arm was stretched out over the side of the bed with her hand resting, palm down, on the bedside table. I reached down to touch it, still thinking I could wake her. Only when I found that her hand was cold and her arm so stiff that, when I lifted it, her whole body moved as well, did I realise she was dead.
I jumped back and cried out.
I panicked, not able, or wanting, to grasp the magnitude of what was happening. I ran down the stairs, turning round and round in the hallway, not sure what to do or which way to go.
Eventually, I ran out of the house.
‘Help!’ I shouted at the top of my voice. ‘Somebody please help me.’
The man from over the road, the one who let me use his garage as a gym, came to my aid, rushing outside as I stood in the centre of the street waving my arms about.
After that, the rest of the day was something of a blur.
An ambulance was called, then the police and a doctor, and finally, much later, a blacked-out van belonging to the undertaker, to collect the body. My uncle arrived with the police and tried hard to take me with him back to the farm where my grandparents were waiting. But I refused to go while my mother was still in the house and, short of actually carrying me out, he had no choice but to wait.
Two burly men in sober dark suits finally took my mother away in what I can only describe as a tied-up canvas sheet with bamboo stays and multiple grab handles down each side, the stairs having been too narrow and too steep to use a conventional stretcher.
I stood by the front door as they carried her out, feet first, to their van.
My mother and I had not always seen eye to eye, especiall
y over my chosen career, but I had loved her nonetheless, and she me. But I found it difficult to weep, or even feel anything at all. It was as if all my emotions had been numbed.
And now, just seven months short of becoming a legal adult, I was an orphan.
So where did I go? Into a children’s home?
In the short term, I went to live with my uncle and grandparents at the family farm, a place full of grief, shock and silence.
The question that we all wanted to know the answer to, but were afraid to ask, was: How did my mother die?
Was it a heart attack? Or a stroke? Or maybe a pulmonary embolism or an aneurism? No. It was none of those. Toxicology tests would eventually show conclusively that the culprit had been an overdose of sleeping pills.
Mum had killed herself. On purpose. She had left no parting note, but suicide was the only logical conclusion.
It transpired that she had been to her doctor the previous week to complain that she was having difficulty getting to sleep. He had recommended she take one 15mg Temazepam tablet each evening, half an hour before going to bed, and had prescribed a four-week course.
From the results of the tests, and the empty pill packets found next to the bed, it would seem that she had taken all twenty-eight at once, on the morning of the day she died. And to be certain of the outcome, she had washed them down with half a bottle of cheap white wine and three vodka miniatures.
Temazepam and alcohol – a truly deadly combination.
Now the question everyone was asking, including me, was: Why?
This had clearly not been a cry for help, in the hope and belief of being found in time, and surviving. That many tablets, plus the booze on top, and at a time when she knew I would be at school for hours to come, could only have produced one outcome.
My mother was nothing if not determined.
But she had also been determined that I should not become a steeplechase jockey, and I had defied her.
Did that make me responsible for her death? Was I to blame, once again, for the death of a parent? Had I effectively killed them both?
That last question was one that was to haunt me for years.
* * *
Lunch on the terrace of the Kulm Hotel is a major highlight of Grand National Day on the Cresta. It is a time for fun, food and plenty of drink, plus a hefty dose of good-natured competitive banter between friends and rivals, at least those that have survived the ice once more, and are not laid-up in hospital.
Today the weather is clear, crisp and cold, with the sun shining brightly from an azure-blue sky. The vista is magnificent. St Moritz is surrounded on all sides by the snow-capped sharp peaks of the Swiss Alps, and laid out to the south of the town centre is the lake, fully frozen over now but a centre for sailing and water sports in the summer.
So thick becomes the ice on the lake throughout the winter that a full-blown racecourse is laid out on it, where on three successive Sundays in February, horses gallop at a race meeting known as White Turf.
The final Sunday of the three is tomorrow.
I stand on the hotel terrace in the sunshine, sipping on a Diet Coke and staring out over the race preparations taking place on the lake.
I feel a hand rest on my shoulder.
‘Bet you wish you were riding there tomorrow,’ says a fellow member of the club, another Brit and someone who, having owned horses himself in the past, is well aware of my horse-racing background.
I shake my head. ‘I gave up all that malarkey long ago.’
‘But you’ll surely be going to watch?’
I shake my head again. ‘I’ve left that life behind me now. It’s time to move on.’
I might wish to be done with horseracing, but I am soon to discover that horseracing isn’t done with me. Not by a long chalk.
6
I finally became a professional jockey two months before my eighteenth birthday. To be precise, I was granted a conditional licence, a trainee, employed by and under the supervision of a local racehorse trainer.
I left school at the end of the term after my mother died, having successfully convinced my grandparents that any further study was a waste of precious riding time. In truth, it had been an easy task. Both my grandparents had left school at fifteen to work on their respective parents’ farms, and they were both of the opinion that they had done well enough without any qualifications, so why shouldn’t I?
Only much later in life would I realise that they were wrong and my mother had been right all along. But such is the determination of the young to get on with their lives that sensible planning for the future doesn’t really enter their consciousness. At least, it didn’t for me. I was just impatient to start riding as a professional – that was all the planning I thought I needed.
And I was going to be the champion, right?
Over the next few months I completed my pre-licence skills assessment, including a mandatory two-week residential course at the British Racing School in Newmarket. While there, I passed my medical and fitness tests as well as being instructed on such matters as technical ability, tactical awareness, financial acumen, lifestyle expectations and dealing with the media, combined with studies of nutrition and health, both mine and that of the horse.
So now I was ready to start work as a conditional jockey.
The move from being a schoolboy to a full-time employee was quite a shock to my system, especially with the early starts – first lot went out at 5.30am in the heat of the summer, which meant I had to leave the farm on my bike before 4.30.
In addition to riding I was now also tasked with looking after three or four of the horses in the yard – grooming, mucking out, feeding and watering – as well as cleaning the tack and the stable yard in general. Every night, my back would ache from the carrying of heavy bedding bales and muck sacks.
It felt like slavery.
But there were compensations.
Riding the horses each day at exercise was my passion, all the more so as I developed a strong bond of mutual affection with them. And, if going to the races was like the icing on my birthday cake, actually riding in one was the candles.
There were far more races reserved for conditional jockeys than for amateurs, plus a conditional was permitted to ride in any race other than those specifically restricted to amateurs. Point-to-points, therefore, were now off limits, much to the disappointment of the owner who had given me my first opportunities between the flags.
‘I’ll just have to back you riding on a proper racecourse,’ he said with a smile when I told him.
And his first opportunity to bet on me as a professional came in a two-mile-five-furlong handicap steeplechase for conditional riders at Cartmel Racecourse at the end of August.
Cartmel is one of the smaller racecourses in Britain, being only a fraction over a mile-long circuit, but it boasts the longest run-in from the last fence to the finish line, almost twice that of the Grand National, and it attracts huge crowds to its nine summer race days, with a funfair in the centre of the track, and everyone in holiday mode.
I arrived early with my trainer and we walked the course together.
‘Remember, it’s a very short loop so this race is two and a half times around,’ he said seriously. ‘So don’t think you’re finishing a circuit too soon. I’ve seen that often done before here.’
‘But the finish chute is cut across the centre,’ I replied. ‘Isn’t it taped off until the right time?’
‘It is, but I’ve still seen several jockeys think they’re about to finish when they find the tape is still in place and there’s another complete circuit to go.’ He laughed. ‘Even Dick Francis did it here once in a three-mile chase.’
We walked every inch of the half-mile run-in and planned our strategy.
‘I think you have a fair chance,’ said the trainer. ‘He’s pretty well handicapped in this company and he likes firm going.’ He tried to dig his heel into the turf but barely made a mark. ‘Maybe not as firm as this, though. Don’t they wa
ter?’
It had been an exceptionally dry summer, especially in the usually rain-soaked Lake District just a few miles down the road, and there was talk of water shortages and hosepipe bans.
‘Keep up with the leaders,’ he said. ‘This is a very sharp track and it’s notoriously difficult to come back if you get too far behind. Make sure you are close-up at the last and don’t push too hard on the run-in until you make the last turn. Some will go too soon and you’ll catch them if you’re clever.’
I nodded and took myself off to change.
I revelled in being in the jockeys’ room as a professional, noting that my name in the race card was down as ‘M. Pussett’ without the ‘Mr’ in front, as in my amateur days.
A few of the older jocks came over to wish me luck.
‘Rode often against your dad when I was younger,’ one of them said. ‘Nice enough chap, but a total effing bastard on a horse.’ He laughed and I took it as a compliment.
Some of my fellow conditionals, however, were not as generous.
‘Just keep out of my bloody way, Pussett,’ one said with a scowl, spraying me in the face with spittle as he pronounced the P.
‘Don’t expect any favours just because of who your dad was,’ said another in an unfriendly tone.
I didn’t expect favours. But I also didn’t expect it to be so raw with them.
Where was that legendary camaraderie of the jockeys’ changing room I’d heard about, where a shared danger brought even fierce competitors close together in mutual respect? Not here, clearly. We were all young bucks trying to make our start in the cut-throat world of an ultra-competitive sport, to establish ourselves as the next Tony McCoy or Ruby Walsh, or maybe the next Jim Pussett, and there was clear resentment that my rivals thought I had a head start with the name.
And they were no more magnanimous when the time came to leave the changing room to go out to the parade ring to mount.
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