Not much to look forward to there, then.
22
‘Miles Pussett to the box.’
My third run of the morning and it’s still only ten-forty. Maybe there will be time for another – perhaps two more. The most I have ever managed in a day was five, but they’d all been from Junction. Now I am starting at Top.
My heart rate rises a notch or two in anticipation and also with a touch of fear. But for me, unlike the colonel, the exhilaration is still definitely worth the fright. And long may it be so.
The bell on the tower is rung and the barrier across the track is lifted.
Time to go.
The track ahead of me glistens due to a very slight thaw, producing a thin layer of water over the still-hard ice surface beneath. Perfect conditions for fast times.
‘Right,’ I say to myself. ‘You now know the line to take into Shuttlecock, so let’s go for it.’
I lean down and push my toboggan fast along the ice, leaping on at the last moment, and I’m away. I almost fly over Church Leap, and then I’m on through the upper bends and along Junction Straight, all the time picking up speed.
Again the question rises in my head – do I rake or not?
Not.
I use my new-found line into Shuttlecock and make the turn with ease, pulling myself forward on the toboggan for extra speed as I hurtle down Bledisloe Straight.
Such is the vibration that it is impossible to see more than five to eight yards ahead and I am relying mostly on my memory of how the run twists and turns – just three slight curves and the Cresta Leap to go.
Hello, hello. Personal-best time, here I come… maybe even membership of the Five-O Club, joining that handful of elite members who have been down in under fifty-one seconds, hence posting a five-o something time.
However, it is not my back I should have been watching out for.
It’s my front.
There is an object lying on the track. Something dark, in the shadow of the road bridge. I see it only at the very last instant and, at the speed I am travelling, there is simply no way to avoid it.
I hit it full-on at eighty miles per hour. I don’t have time to rake or even to roll off my toboggan.
One moment I’m hurtling along in expectation of my personal-best time and the next I am flying through the air like a rag doll before crashing back onto the ice at least fifteen to twenty yards further on.
I land heavily, first on my right shoulder and then on my back, the force of the latter impact driving the air from my lungs. I instantly know I’ve done some serious damage, as the pain that shoots through me is excruciating.
But I still don’t stop moving.
I slide on down to the bottom of the run on my back, feet first, but without my toboggan, which appears to have gone elsewhere. At least that’s a relief, as I don’t fancy the thirty-five kilograms of it crashing into me as well.
Finally, I come to a halt at the lowest point and I lie stationary on the ice in total agony, unable to move, waiting for help to arrive.
The first person to appear is one of the men from the company that construct the track each year from scratch, and maintain it throughout the season.
‘You OK?’ he asks in heavily accented English.
But I am unable to reply because the pain is making breathing difficult.
The man is soon joined by two others and they radio to Tower that medical help is urgently needed.
Someone else then arrives holding my toboggan and we can all see that it is badly deformed at the front, bent out of shape by the force of the collision.
They look horrified, as am I.
Suddenly, all sorts of people are around me, including the hierarchy of the club, and all of them want to know what happened.
‘I hit something,’ I finally manage to say, although my words are muffled by my helmet.
Someone bends down to remove it.
‘Don’t touch me!’ I shout. ‘Wait for the medics.’
They hear that all right, and back off. If my time as a jockey has taught me anything it is that you don’t move an injured rider without using the proper medical procedure, for fear of doing them even more harm.
I can hear them talking about what I hit – a bag of cement has been found lying in the middle of the track.
If there was horror before, there is now uncontrolled anger.
‘How could that possibly happen?’ I hear someone say forcefully.
How indeed?
‘But Jock came down before him, just a minute earlier. He didn’t encounter anything.’
Lucky Jock.
The club secretary comes into my limited field of view.
‘Miles,’ he says, crouching down. ‘I’m so very sorry about this. Medical help is on the way.’
‘I’m cold.’
The secretary takes off his own coat and places it over me. He must be really worried, as he’s now standing in only his shirt sleeves with the air temperature still close to freezing. Fortunately for him, blankets are found and he can put his coat back on again. But my back is still in contact with the ice and it’s getting very cold indeed.
Finally, after what seems like an age, two medical personnel in bright-red uniforms arrive.
‘Where does it hurt?’ one of them says to me in English with a German accent.
‘My right shoulder and my neck.’
Mention of my neck gets them very agitated.
‘Can you feel your legs?’ He squeezes one of my ankles.
‘I can feel that.’
They relax a little.
Gingerly they remove my helmet, replacing it with a stiff surgical collar tight round my neck. Then they support my head as they roll me onto my left side to place a stretcher underneath.
The sides of the track add to their problems but they manage it eventually, but not before I have uttered a few choice Anglo-Saxon expletives both at the pain of being moved and the discomfort of having to lie on the back protector under my sliding suit.
‘We will give you something for the pain,’ says one of the medics.
I wonder why he didn’t do that before moving me.
All the while the group from the Cresta have been standing around watching. I catch a few snippets of their conversations.
‘How could such a thing happen?’
‘This could close down the club. It could be the end of the Cresta Run as we know it.’
‘Where did the bag of cement come from?’
And, of course, the really big question: ‘Was it done on purpose?’
* * *
The car Jerry sent to pick me up at eleven o’clock from Lincoln County Hospital was his own Mercedes, but he wasn’t driving it. Somewhat surprisingly, it was his wife behind the wheel.
I had only met her a few times, either at the races or occasionally when I’d waited in their back porch for Jerry to drive me to a racecourse. To my knowledge, she had never visited the stable yard during my time there.
‘Hello, Mrs Dickinson,’ I said, putting my holdall on the back seat and climbing in the front.
‘Call me Sabrina,’ she replied with a smile.
She drove in silence for quite a long while, right through Lincoln city centre, past the grandeur of Lincoln Cathedral with its three tall bell towers, and then out on the road towards – where else? – Newark.
‘Can you recommend a doctor?’ I asked her eventually.
‘What sort of doctor?’ Sabrina replied, keeping her eyes on the road.
‘I need a GP.’
‘Aren’t you registered with the surgery in Lambourn? That’s where everyone in the village goes.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I suppose I must have been registered there when I was a kid, but I never bothered when I moved back from Yorkshire.’
‘It’s dead easy to switch surgeries,’ Sabrina said. ‘Just pop in to the reception and fill out a form. They’ll do the rest.’
‘I can’t even recall where it is?’
�
��On Bockhampton Road. Not far from the primary school.’
‘Right. I’ll pop in sometime.’
She drove on further in silence, round the Newark bypass, and on towards Leicester, where we joined the southbound M1.
‘Why do you need a GP?’ Sabrina asked as we passed the exit for Rugby. ‘Is it something I can help you with?’
I sat there without speaking.
‘I’m sorry,’ Sabrina said, after a minute or so. ‘I didn’t mean to pry.’
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘And it is nice to know that someone cares. It’s just that I’m not quite sure where to start.’
‘Take your time. There’s no hurry. Nor any need to start at all if you don’t want to.’
Did I want to?
It was one thing talking to medical professionals who I didn’t know. Quite a different matter talking to the wife of my employer – an employer who had been spitting blood the last time I’d seen him.
We continued on in silence, leaving the M1 at Northampton and taking the road towards Oxford. Only when we had turned off the Oxford bypass onto the road to Wantage did I say anything further.
‘They want me to have an assessment.’
‘Who does?’ Sabrina asked.
‘The doctors at Lincoln Hospital.’
‘Why?’
‘They think I might have something wrong with my brain. The assessment would find out for sure.’
‘But why do they think that?’
‘I’m having nightmares. And also panic attacks. That’s what I had last night. A panic attack. I ended up lying on a street in Newark town centre, at midnight. I thought I was dying. Two policemen found me and called an ambulance. It took me to hospital.’
Sabrina looked over at me briefly and there was real concern in her face.
‘But what were you doing on the streets of Newark town centre at midnight? Weren’t you in hospital because of a fall at the races?’
‘No. I didn’t have a fall. I was just trying to get home.’
‘But I thought Jerry took you.’
‘He did.’
She looked at me again, this time with puzzlement written in her features.
‘Are you telling me that Jerry took you to Market Rasen but he didn’t bring you home again?’ She was obviously angry, and it wasn’t with me.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But it’s not quite that simple.’
I told her about the race I had ridden on Gasfitter and how we had been beaten on the line after I’d been left flat-footed at the start, and how furious Jerry had been with me. I also explained what had happened afterwards.
I told her of my abortive attempt to travel back by train on a Sunday evening, and how everything seemed to have conspired against me.
‘Even so, Jerry should never have left without you.’
She drove us round the northern side of Wantage, then up over the Downs, before finally dropping down into the ‘Valley of the Racehorse’, as the area around Lambourn is styled.
‘Do you want to come home with me to our place?’ Sabrina asked as we entered the village.
‘Will Mr Dickinson be there?’ I couldn’t keep the anxiety out of my voice.
‘I expect so,’ Sabrina said. ‘I know he wasn’t going to the races today.’
‘Perhaps I shouldn’t then.’
‘As you like, but you’ll have to face him sometime and it might be better if I’m there to act as a peacemaker.’ She looked over and smiled.
I swallowed hard. ‘OK. If you say so.’
* * *
I am airlifted by helicopter the short distance to the roof of the Upper Engadin Hospital in the village of Samedan, just beyond Celerina, where most Cresta members have ended up at one time or another. This is my second visit.
The medics are taking no chances as I am strapped tight to a spinal board.
There is considerable commotion going on around me as I am being readied for the transfer. The police have now been called and the Cresta Run has been closed, at least for the rest of the day.
One of them tries to speak to me but he is shooed away by my friends in the red uniforms. They say something to the policeman in German, the only word of which I can catch is ‘morphium’, which I take to mean morphine.
The drug is helping, not that the pain has gone away completely. It remains concentrated in my right shoulder and I reckon I must have dislocated it. My father once put his out in a fall at Newbury when I was a small child, and he always told me it was far more painful than a break.
He may have been right.
The other thing that is almost as painful is that the emergency staff at the hospital simply use scissors to cut off my very expensive skin-tight aerodynamic sliding suit, something that took me two whole years of saving to afford.
A full body CT scan reveals that my right shoulder is, indeed, dislocated and there is also a crack in my shoulder blade. However, the really good news is that my neck and spine are undamaged and the surgical collar can be removed. Thank the Lord for the back protector after all, uncomfortable to lie on or not.
Overall, I have been very lucky. A collision at eighty miles per hour can easily be fatal. I know that well from past experience.
After what seems like a very long time, one of the doctors comes over to see me, leaning down to where I am lying flat on my back.
‘I’m Dr Kaufmann, one of the orthopaedic doctors here, and I am going to put your shoulder back in place now.’ He is holding a loaded syringe. ‘I’m going to give you a drug called ketamine for the pain. You will not remember anything afterwards.’
That’s a relief.
* * *
‘You wait in here,’ Sabrina said as we went into the Dickinson kitchen through their back door. ‘I’ll go and fetch Jerry. He’ll be in the snug watching the racing on the TV.’
My heart was pounding. Maybe it was because I didn’t know whether I still had a job or not, and was about to find out, or perhaps it was because I needed a drink.
Sabrina was taking some time to return and the pounding was getting worse. At one point I almost lost my nerve and walked out. But where would I go? The house I shared with the other conditionals was just that – conditional on me having a job in Jerry’s stable.
After about five minutes, which felt like five hours, Sabrina came back into the kitchen. Jerry was with her.
‘We have decided,’ she said, ‘that you should move in here with us, at least for the time being. You can have our son Nigel’s old room. He works in New York and hardly ever comes home.’
I looked at Jerry and wondered if he had actually been party to this decision, or whether his wife had simply told him what was happening.
‘Do I still have a job here?’ I asked.
‘Of course you do,’ Sabrina said. ‘Jerry is very sorry for leaving you behind yesterday. Aren’t you, Jerry?’
He didn’t look very sorry but, eventually, he nodded.
‘I’m very sorry,’ he mumbled, biting his lip.
He stepped forward and offered his hand, which I shook.
‘I’m sorry, too,’ I said.
‘Then we’ll say nothing more about it. Back to normal.’
The ice was broken, even if relations clearly remained somewhat frosty.
I could really do with that drink.
23
True to Dr Kaufmann’s word, I have no recollection of having my shoulder put back into place. It seems that one minute I am in agony and, the very next moment, all is well – or almost.
My right arm is held tight to my body in a restrictive sling, presumably to stop it moving, and my shoulder aches as if it’s been kicked by a horse, but it is a huge improvement on what it was like before.
I am lying on a bed in a single room in the hospital with a magnificent view of the Alps through the window – it is almost enough to make anyone feel better.
Hanging over a chair at the foot of the bed is what remains of my sliding suit, the Lycra cut into strips and ut
terly destroyed beyond repair. I wonder if my insurance will pay for a replacement. Probably not.
After a while, the doctor comes in to see me.
‘Ah, you’re awake,’ he says. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘Much better, thank you.’
‘Good. I would like you to rest here for a while, to allow the effects of the ketamine to wear off completely, but there are a whole host of people outside waiting to talk to you.’
‘Who?’
‘A policeman for a start. He’s the first in line. Then there are the president and secretary of the St Moritz Tobogganing Club, together with most of their committee, plus some reporters who want a quote. It seems you are quite a celebrity. I’ve managed to hold them all at bay so far, but the policeman is very pressing.’
‘What time is it?’ I ask.
‘About three o’clock.’
It is four and a half hours since I started that last run on the ice.
‘Where has all the time gone?’
‘That’s what ketamine does to you – it steals your life away. But it works. You don’t remember anything about having your shoulder reduced, do you?’
I shake my head. Perhaps I could try some more of this ketamine stuff to erase a few other bad memories.
‘You had better wheel in the police and then some of the Cresta lot,’ I say, ‘not that I’ll be able to tell them anything useful. But I’m not keen on seeing the reporters.’
‘Don’t worry. I’ll make sure that everyone else is kept out.’
‘Thanks.’
The doctor goes out and is soon replaced by a policeman in a smart blue uniform with a gun on his hip. He sits beside my bed, notebook at the ready.
Over the next half-hour he asks me lots of questions about what I did throughout the morning, but he is really only interested in one thing – did I see anyone on the bridge drop a bag of cement onto the track as I was coming down?
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I saw absolutely no one. The only thing I saw was the bag lying on the track, and then only a fraction of a second before I hit it. Nothing else.’
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