A Fine Place to Daydream

by Bill Barich

  OCTOBER

  Stirrings

  It was early autumn when I settled in Dublin to be closer to Imelda Healy, my new love. Apartments were scarce in the city, so I took what I could get, a tiny one-bedroom in a fancy gated complex, where the other tenants were all baby stockbrokers and Chinese students of English. The building was a tribute to Ireland’s booming economy and dwarfed the little Victorian cottages on the Dodder River nearby. Our porter was a fierce-eyed, black-haired rogue, and when he saw me parsing the Racing Post one afternoon, he gave me a tip on a horse running at Punchestown in County Kildare. That caused an odd stirring in me. I felt I belonged.

  The horse lost, of course, but that was all right. I wasn’t in it for the money, not yet. In a way, the porter had opened a gate, and I saw how uninformed I was about Irish racing compared to the English scene. In London, I’d fallen into the habit of playing the televised races every Saturday, rising early and poring over the Post as diligently as a convict ransacking law books for a loophole to set him free. I liked the dense columns of statistics, the paper’s oddly poetic jargon, and the underlying assumption that the puzzle could be solved, and the brambly nature of existence untangled, if only for an instant.

  While the English are fond of their racing, I discovered the Irish can’t live without it. Their embrace of the sport is passionate, a streak of lightning in the blood. Nothing grips them as powerfully as the sight of horses jumping over hurdles and steeplechase fences, maybe because it carries an echo of the country’s rural, agricultural heritage and has the power to touch people, and even move them. Whatever the case, this was new territory for me, and I took to it so readily that the flat races began to bore me. Devoted to speed, they were over in a flash, while a good chase unfolded as leisurely as a Hardy novel. The jump races were rich in subplots and dramatic reversals of fate, too, plus they had a pastoral aspect that was transcendent, and entirely beautiful.

  A year later, I moved in with Imelda, into her house in a quiet neighborhood. I was hooked on the National Hunt by then and often strolled down the block to our neighborhood bookmakers. We have two nearby, Paddy Power and Boylesports, both Irish-owned chains. The shops are so neat, clean, and wholesome they make gambling a normal, even welcome part of everyday life. Their motto might be, “Stop in and bring your grannie,” rather than Boylesports’ urgent injunction, “Bet here!” as if you wouldn’t have a chance to be a loser again for many a mile. Indeed, I did see a grannie in the shops on occasion, filling out a betting slip (the ticket you give to a clerk, specifying your wager) with her poor wrinkled fingers.

  Soon I was a devoted customer and drifted between the shops on the tides of fortune, good or ill, loyalty in gamblers being linked to the flow of luck. My fellow punters, as the Brits and the Irish say, were a diverse crew. The regulars were retired, or unemployed and on the government dole, and they were joined at intervals by working people taking a break—a barman, say, or a grocer—all glued to the shop’s TVs and betting on races in Ireland, England, South Africa, and even Dubai, along with computer-generated virtual races and, possibly sinking lower, the greyhounds. They were quiet for the most part, rarely raising their voices to cheer or object, but at times I heard a muted cry of “Go on, my son!” to boost a faltering horse, and also the words fookin’ and fickin’ used frequently, often applied to certain jockeys.

  The more I watched the jumps, the more I understood the Irish passion. There would be no National Hunt without Ireland, in fact. Even in England, the best horses are Irish-bred, and the best riders are also imported. Tony McCoy, who’s broken every record, is a stable jockey for an English trainer, and so, too, are Mick Fitzgerald, Ruby Walsh, and Jim Culloty, while Barry Geraghty rides in England’s big races on a freelance basis. The British actually looked down their noses at the steeplechase during the colonial period, dismissing it as a “bastard amusement” inferior to flat racing. Yet chases have long been a feature of Irish country life, born of the landscape and a profound love of the hunt. To recycle a hoary legend, the first chase supposedly occurred in County Cork in 1752, a match race between Edmund Blake and Cornelius O’Callaghan from Buttevant Church to St. Mary’s Church in Doneraile, its steeple visible about five miles away. The prize was a hogshead of wine.

  By the nineteenth century, the steeplechase was firmly established as an Irish sport. The courses, noted one observer, “were laid out over perfectly natural country; not a single sod or stone would be removed nor a fence trimmed, and there was no leveling of places where the going was bad.” A rider picked his own line to follow and jumped whatever he met along the way. The races could be terrifying, but the public loved it. Every horse fell at least once, and it wasn’t uncommon for a winner to fall three or four times. Heroes emerged, among them Black Jack Dennis, a daredevil of renown, who once jumped a five-foot-high fence and the donkey cart parked in front of it. To cash a bet, Dennis rode the awesome course at Rahasane (ten stone walls, twenty-five fences) without a saddle or a bridle, relying on a cabbage stalk for a whip.

  I read about those amazing feats at the National Library in Dublin, a timeless old building as sleepy and dusty as any scholar could wish for. On my walk into town, I’d buy a few pencils at our newsagent’s (pens are banned from the library to prevent some creep from imitating Joyce’s marginalia), then cross over to Baggot Street and pass the birthplace of Francis Bacon, whose father trained racehorses while Bacon screwed around with the stable lads. The temptation to stop for a jar of the black stuff at Doheny & Nesbit’s was always strong, but I resisted and rounded a corner by the Shelbourne Hotel, host in 1842 to William Thackeray, who complained that his room hadn’t been “scoured” for months, although he praised the kind and gentle staff. For Elizabeth Bowen, the hotel—so solid and prosperous—wasn’t typically Irish. “We have a reputation for distress, miscarried projects, evanescent dreams, and romantic gloom,” she wrote, “and the Shelbourne is the antithesis of those things.”

  Up the library’s central staircase I climbed, into the deep silence of the reading room with my reader’s ticket and its ghoulish passport photo (I’d closed my eyes by accident, so the picture resembled a postmortem shot) on a chain around my neck. I blended comfortably into the mix of genealogy buffs digging up their ancestors, students doing research for term papers, budding writers courting inspiration, and the predictable quotient of evanescent dreamers. Soft-spoken, well-mannered clerks disappeared into the tomblike stacks to unearth the books I requested, and I sat and studied and got the lay of the land.

  Sometimes when I tired of reading I’d lift my head, stare at the ring of cherubs on the ceiling, and realize with a profound sense of wonder that I was truly living in Ireland—in Dublin, a city I had visited only once before as an impressionable young tourist in search of literary landmarks. Out to Howth and Dalkey I rode the train, recalling Flann O’Brien and his curious archive, and I went to Sandymount Strand, as well, where I had an icy hike along the water and battled a fierce winter wind that removed a layer of skin from my cheeks. Near Mountjoy Square, in an act that now smacks of foreshadowing, I put a small wager on a horse running at Leopardstown, who shocked me by winning and caused a nightlong celebration and an awful morning-after.

  Now those landmarks were an aspect of home to me. The transition was miraculous, but also completely ordinary. Imelda and I often talked about chance—fate, destiny, call it what you will—and how the tiniest missed signal could have kept us apart. We’d met by accident at a gallery opening in London where Dorothy Cross, an artist friend of Imelda’s from Dublin, had a show. As Imelda and I chatted over the lukewarm glasses of white wine that seem to appear globally at such openings, I learned that she was an artist, too—a figurative painter, her subject matter a cross-referencing of her personal life with classical and Renaissance imagery—and that she had two teenage sons and had been separated from her husband for many years. To my surprise, I also learned that divorce has only been fully legal in Ireland since February 1997. I’d be
en divorced myself for almost a decade.

  The gallery was so crowded and noisy, and so heavy with the torpor of art being appreciated, that I asked Imelda to join me at a quieter place where we could chat in peace, but she declined. That would be disloyal to Dorothy, she felt. She was there to support her friend, and I was so wounded by her failure to perceive me as I wanted to be perceived—as the man she’d been waiting for, that is, although in fact she hadn’t been waiting at all—I stalked off in an arrogant huff and wound up in a wretched, noisier, absolute hellhole of a pub down the block in Soho. Worse, when I went to the gents, the fellow next to me peed inaccurately and splashed my shoes.

  What if I hadn’t swallowed my pride and returned to the gallery? What if Imelda hadn’t called me on her next trip to London? What if I’d complained about the overpriced restaurant where I took her for dinner, instead of keeping my big mouth shut for once? And so on. Though I have always believed in chance, fate, destiny, et cetera, Imelda frankly surpasses me. She has a mystical side and a sincere faith in the power of coincidence, being Irish to the core.

  Certainly, I have never lived anywhere on earth where the citizens latch on to racing tips with such enthusiasm, as a drowning man might cling to a piece of flotsam. So-called inside information circulates with abandon, extracted from the most dubious possible sources—a barber, say, who cuts the hair of a man whose son goes to school in Tipperary with a nephew of Edward O’Grady, the trainer. Yet even though I recognized the sorry provenance of those tips, I wasn’t immune to their allure—not at first—so when I was getting my hair cut one day and heard the barber whispering to another customer about Caishill, a “sure thing” running at Listowel in County Kerry—this was in September 2003—I dashed to Boylesports and threw a fiver on the horse.

  The race was a steeplechase over two miles and six furlongs. On the face of it, Caishill was up against it, being younger and less experienced than others in the field, but he had a talented jockey in Shay Barry. The race was a handicap, too, meaning that each horse carried more or less weight depending on its level of success, so Caishill was among the lightest, but Caishill banged into the ninth fence and fell, despite his advantage. Horses hit the ground so hard, with their delicate legs flailing, I am always shocked by how swiftly most of them recover, upright again in seconds and often none the worse for wear, except for the potential psychological damage. Some jumpers shake off a fall as Caishill did, later winning a chase in November, but others become scarred and inhibited and shy from fences as they would from any source of pain.

  But it’s the jump jockeys who take the greatest risk, really, since they’re more fragile and vulnerable than their horses. I once read a list of the injuries Carl Llewellyn, a veteran rider in his late thirties, has suffered in his career, and it made the hair on my head stand up: a broken cheekbone, two broken collarbones, nine concussions, eight broken noses, two broken jaws, two broken ribs, a broken wrist, a broken elbow, and a broken pinkie, along with soft tissue bruising and ligament, tendon, and muscle damage too extensive to mention. The catalog would be familiar to many jockeys, a fact that stands in testimony to their courage and love of the game. Though Llewellyn has endured a battering, I knew he counted himself lucky to still be riding at his age because most men (women jump jockeys are rare, except in the amateur ranks) don’t last so long.

  That same September, I saw some hard evidence of how abruptly a jockey’s riding life can end when Norman Williamson, a gifted jock with over 1,200 wins to his credit, took an awful spill at Downpatrick, in Northern Ireland. He lay so still on the ground, not moving a muscle, that it scared everyone. The fans were hushed, afraid he was dead. He swore that he felt okay and even winked at Paul Carberry, another rider, to show it, but he did ask the paramedics to put a brace on his neck for safety’s sake, and that meant he had to undergo a physical exam before he’d be permitted to ride again. After a subsequent MRI in London, the doctors informed him that his next fall might lead to paralysis—he had vertebrae in his neck that wouldn’t settle—so Williamson, only thirty-four and in his prime, chose to hang up his boots.

  Yet he, too, had to count himself lucky, aware of what had happened to others. Only a month before, Kieran Kelly, a popular and promising young Irish jockey, fell in a race and landed on his head. Though he wore a helmet, he broke his neck and lasted just a week on life support before he died. Others have survived such horrible accidents and stayed in the sport, as Shane Broderick did after injuring his spinal cord in a fall in 1997. It was as if Broderick had been in a motorcycle crash, tossed over the handlebars and smashed into the pavement headfirst, but he fought back, went through extensive rehabilitation, and now trains horses despite being a paraplegic.

  Jump jockeys don’t dwell on the negatives, obviously. They can’t afford to, so they stay in perpetual motion, busy all the time. And that autumn—the autumn of Best Mate’s quest for a third Gold Cup—they were more concerned about the weather, anyway, and how it was affecting their finances. The month of September was the driest on record in England, and Ireland was almost as dry. Without the soft, safe ground that jumpers need as a cushion, most horses were behind schedule, not yet wholly fit. Trainers were careful with their best stock, unwilling to take a risk, so the fields in many races were small, sometimes just three or four entries. Punters sniffed at the short prices available, and the bookies were reported to be bleeding.

  Racing fans are optimists, though, so I had no doubt the weather would ultimately oblige. As a third-year Dubliner, I put the chance of a drought at 10,000–1 based on past experience. I knew how wet, cold, and sometimes miserable I’d be as I indulged my new passion and traveled around the country to investigate the Irish obsession with the jumpers. I wanted a proper education before I tackled the Cheltenham Festival and tried to prove my mettle as a gambler. Walking home from the library on an evening in early October, beneath the island’s ever-changing sky, I made a mental note to buy some waterproof shoes and fill my little silver flask, a gift from Imelda, with some good Jameson’s whiskey against the trials to come.

  SO I BEGAN MY JOURNEY the next morning and boarded a train for Kilkenny at Heuston Station, hard by the Liffey and the Guinness brewery, where the smell of roasted hops fills the air. I was bound for Gowran Park Racecourse to meet Jessica Harrington, always among Ireland’s most successful trainers and one of the only women. As we traveled southeast past Kildare, Athy, and Carlow, there were more farms with each passing mile. The landscape had an earthy coherence, even a sense of rightness, and the new cookie-cutter suburbs looked out of place to me—too American, I thought, wishing I could stop the train and warn the Irish before it was too late. Sad to say, they were becoming victims of “progress.”

  From Kilkenny with its bright air of prosperity, I took a taxi to the track. We drove by more rich farmland, through woods where the trees were touched with autumn color. I’d noticed this before in Ireland, a sudden transition from the urban to the rural, as if time itself were switching gears, forced to slow down and adjust to the more measured beat of country life. Over a distance of eight miles, we’d left behind a bustling city and entered a different century. It could have been 1914 at Gowran Park, the year the racecourse opened. The fans were in no hurry for the action to start. They were happy to gather in small groups and talk, friends and neighbors at a fair. Old men in flat caps were everywhere. I counted twenty-two sitting on a long bench by the racing secretary’s office, their heads bobbing as they shared the latest gossip. There were merchants selling candy and ice cream, and kids quizzing the bookies as they set up their pitches—their chosen spots, for which they paid a price to the track.

  Gowran Park was so intimate and informal I felt I was less a spectator than a participant, inside rather than outside the racing. At the parade ring, or paddock, before the first race, I could have reached out and touched the circling horses. I could see the down on the upper lips of the youngest jockeys, lads still in their late teens. When the jockeys finished a
ride, they had to walk right through the crowd to get to the weighing room, where they changed their silks and kept their tack. The passage would be unimaginable at most U.S. tracks, where disgruntled fans, probably armed, might shoot them for their failure. Here they were treated to sympathy and a little soft-core heckling.

  “You picked the wrong one again!” somebody teased a skinny youth, who’d been on a loser.

  “But I don’t get a choice!” the lad complained. With his accent, choice became chice and sounded chewed upon.

  I met Harrington after the race. Known to everyone as Jessie, she emerged from the weighing room with a purposeful stride, cutting a path through the scurrying jockeys, who were already stripping off their clothes. Tall and lean, she has the attractive, outdoorsy look of someone who has logged countless hours on horseback. Her idea of a great holiday is a riding safari in Kenya. In her late fifties, with lively blue eyes, she keeps her blondish hair cut short for a minimum of fuss. I had the impression she resisted fussiness at every turn, unwilling to waste a minute on anything frivolous. Her voice had a hint of Anglo-Irish stiffness, but her manner was cordial and helpful.

  I thought Jessie’s no-nonsense attitude might come from Brigadier B. J. “Frizz” Fowler, her father, who moved his family from England, where she was born, to Ireland in 1949, settling a few years later on a farm in County Meath he’d inherited from an uncle. The brigadier hunted, played polo, and raced in an occasional point-to-point, so Jessie grew up around horses and other animals. She can’t remember learning how to ride—being on a horse was second nature. As a girl, she belonged to a pony club and became one of the country’s top eventers, traveling to Los Angeles as a member of Ireland’s Olympic team in 1984. Her background has granted her what military types call “command presence.” If she had issued an order, I would have followed it without question.