‘But I drive past it going to work every day,’ I said flippantly.
‘You know what I mean.’
He knew better than to try to order me not to act as a racecourse doctor, persuasion rather than proscription always being the best method, but there was definite worry etched on his face.
‘I’ll be fine,’ I said, trying to reassure him. ‘Maybe I wasn’t ready when I went back last time. But I’m better now. And all that other stuff is firmly behind me.’
Little did I realise that it was also still firmly out in front, and it was about to come head-on at me like a runaway train.
25
There was a real spring in my step as I walked in through the racecourse entrance on Wednesday morning.
Things had been going well at the hospital and I had rediscovered my enthusiasm for emergency medicine. True, I was still being monitored by other consultants, but I had been given more and more responsibility and, best of all, I hadn’t once had to go and hide in the linen cupboard.
At home, things hadn’t been quite so good.
The twins were doing well at school and seemingly unaffected by their mother being ill. However, relations with Grant had recently clearly been on the slide. He had confided in one of my girlfriends from the village that he was fed up at always having to be careful around me in order not to cause an upset.
The girlfriend had reckoned that he was telling her in the hope and expectation that she would pass it on and she had done so almost immediately.
Whereas in the months before Christmas, my reaction might have been one of panic and dread, I was now more calm and pragmatic. I was even able to speculate on whether Grant had really told my girlfriend because he fancied her. Maybe, in spite of what he had said, he actually wanted me to starve to death so that he’d be free to pursue her.
I knew I’d annoyed him by insisting that I was going back to act as a racecourse doctor. Had I gone too far? But I hadn’t realised how much those days meant to me until I thought I’d had them taken away forever.
Even at breakfast that very morning, he had still tried to dissuade me.
‘I couldn’t possibly let them down at this short notice,’ I’d said. But I had no intention of letting them down at all because I loved it so much.
In order to remain on the approved list, I had to act as a racecourse doctor for a minimum of eight days per annum and, due to my illness and absence, I would struggle to fulfil the requirement for the current year if I only worked at Cheltenham. Hence, I already had plans to make myself available to other local courses, such as Worcester, Hereford and Stratford.
Not that I’d mentioned it yet to Grant. He was angry enough already that I was going back at all.
Cheltenham races at the April meeting was nothing like that for the Festival. It was a much more low-key affair with an expected daily attendance of only ten thousand, a mere seventh of the crowd that had witnessed the Gold Cup the previous month.
Much of the tented village of shops and restaurants had been removed and the site where, in March, thousands of Irish visitors had sung along with live bands and poured copious pints of Guinness down their throats was now simply a flat empty space.
The temporary grandstands and glass-fronted restaurants that had stretched down the finishing straight well past the second-last fence were nothing more than a distant memory and the grass on which they had been erected was already recovering in the spring sunshine.
But, after the hurly-burly of the racecourse at the Festival, when getting from one place to another involved pushing through a crowd at every corner, there was something rather nice about the open spaces and the gentler pace of the April meeting.
Jump racing was winding down towards the end of the season and, even though some jumping continued throughout the summer months at the smaller courses, Cheltenham definitely had an ‘end of term’ feel about it. Not that the racing would be any less competitive, with plenty of horses going to post for the seven races on each of the two days.
I was early, very early, such had been my eagerness for the day to begin.
The first race was not until almost two o’clock but I was in the medical room well before a quarter to twelve. I had tried to stay at home for most of the morning but I’d done nothing but continually look at my watch, urging the hands to hurry up and move round to my chosen leaving time. At eleven o’clock, I’d given up waiting and had driven to the racecourse a good half an hour before I’d intended, parking my Mini in the doctors’ reserved spaces adjacent to the jockeys’ car park.
With so many fewer spectators, I had no concerns about exit queues at the end of the day, so there had been no need on this occasion to park in Tom and Julie’s farmyard.
I was busily checking through the medical kits when Jack Otley came sweeping in.
‘Morning, Chris,’ he said. ‘You’re here early.’
‘Hi, Jack,’ I replied. ‘So are you.’
‘I’m going for a spot of lunch with some friends who have a box,’ he said. ‘Just dropping off my coat. Will you tell Adrian I’ll be back in an hour and ask him to hold off his briefing till I get back? I’d appreciate it.’
‘OK,’ I said, ‘will do.’
Jack hung up his coat on a hook outside the medical room door and departed at a trot for his lunch.
Lunch? I hadn’t really thought about lunch.
I wondered if I should get some now before we got busy.
But, in truth, lunch had been a problem for some considerable time. I simply had to eat some breakfast as Grant and the boys were watching and they would get very agitated if I didn’t eat something with them each morning at the kitchen table. And the same was true for dinner. However, at lunchtime I was nearly always on my own, at least during the week, so the ‘food police’ were unaware of whether I ate anything or not.
Mostly not.
Two meals a day were about as many as I could stomach.
One would have been better.
Eating, or rather the lack of it, was the one thing still holding back my recovery. I still saw myself as too fat in spite of what the bathroom scales might say to the contrary. Grant had threatened to remove all the mirrors in the house so that I couldn’t see my reflection but I’d told him not to be so silly. But it wasn’t really silly. I looked at myself in those mirrors all the time, and I didn’t much like the view.
I decided that, on balance, I could do without lunch. Again.
Instead, I walked out onto the terrace in front of the weighing room and soaked up some of the rays.
As was often the case in the United Kingdom in recent years, this April had so far been one of the best months for sunshine with warm days and cool evenings, and today was no exception.
I stood facing the sun with my eyes closed, allowing its heat to soak deep into my soul.
‘You look happy, doc,’ said a voice in front of me.
I opened my eyes. It was Dave Leigh, he of the broken collarbone.
‘Oh, hi, Dave,’ I said. ‘How are things? Are you working for the TV people again?’
‘No,’ he said with a laugh, ‘I’m back riding.’
‘So soon?’ I said with surprise. It had only been a month since he’d broken it. ‘You must heal very quickly.’
‘Had my first ride back on Monday at Huntingdon. It was a winner too.’
‘Well done,’ I said.
‘I’ve got three more here today so I arrived good and early. Didn’t want to miss out due to a breakdown or a traffic jam.’
‘Where do you live?’ I asked.
‘Lambourn,’ he said. ‘Centre of the universe.’
Lambourn was a large village nestling among the rolling Berkshire Downs between Newbury and Swindon. It was a major training centre for racehorses, especially jumpers, with over thirty active trainers having yards in and around the village. And it was only about an hour’s drive from Cheltenham.
Dave Leigh was clearly almost as eager as I for the day’s racing to begin
.
But he was not the only person on the terrace that I recognised. Rupert Forrester was also there, no doubt checking that all was in order. He looked in my direction and then came over.
‘Dr Rankin,’ he said, ‘good of you to help us out at such short notice.’
He extended his hand and I shook it.
‘No problem,’ I said. ‘Lovely day for it.’
‘Thank goodness,’ he said. ‘It makes a huge difference to the gate.’
I could imagine. No one wanted to go racing in the rain.
‘I saw you on Monday,’ he said. ‘At the inquest of that poor man.’
‘I spotted you there as well.’
He nodded. ‘I was there to represent the racecourse. Fortunately I wasn’t called by the coroner. Always difficult when someone dies on the premises.’
‘The man actually died in hospital,’ I said.
‘Yes, so he did. But there have been others. We had three in one day last year, at the Festival. Two heart attacks and a burst aneurysm. The racing must have been too exciting for them.’ He laughed at his own inappropriate joke. ‘Ah, well, I must get on.’
He disappeared into the weighing room while I went back to enjoying the sunshine. But he had made me think.
Human life was very fragile. I knew that only too well from my work. No one expected to go for a day at the races and not make it home again afterwards. But it happened all the time. Not just heart attacks and burst aneurysms but also strokes, cardiac arrhythmia and pulmonary embolisms. All were common causes of sudden and unexpected death, to say nothing of road accidents and other forms of trauma.
Yet some people’s bodies could take all sorts of punishment and still continue to operate almost normally.
And jockeys like Dave Leigh were clearly in that category.
Jack Otley was late returning from his lunch and Adrian Kings wasn’t particularly pleased at having to wait to give his briefing.
‘I hope you haven’t been drinking,’ Adrian said acidly when he finally arrived.
‘Of course not,’ Jack replied, somewhat aggrieved.
Good job too, I thought. We were the only three racecourse doctors on duty, the absolute minimum requirement and one less than was customary at Cheltenham due to the intersecting nature of the track. No wonder Rupert Forrester had been so pleased that I was able to step in at such short notice.
Adrian, however, was never going to admit that he was steering his ship too close to the rocks, and certainly not to me.
‘All three of us will be out on the course,’ he said. ‘Plus we have four ambulances. That will provide plenty of cover.’
The racing authority rules were quite simple. Irrespective of the number of ambulances available, not enough doctors would result in racing having to be abandoned.
Briefing over, I went out to fetch a coffee from the cafeteria and came face-to-face in the corridor with Jason Conway.
He looked at me and I at him, from a distance of about eighteen inches. I was quite calm.
‘Hello, JC,’ I said.
‘Doc,’ he replied, not batting an eyelid at my use of his nickname.
‘How many rides do you have today?’ I asked.
‘Three.’ He didn’t move.
I stared deep into his eyes. Then I looked away. I wasn’t going back there.
‘Good luck,’ I said. ‘I hope I don’t have to see you later.’
‘No chance,’ he said.
In spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, jockeys were always supremely confident that they wouldn’t get hurt. They had to be, otherwise they’d never do the job in the first place. The fact that, when doing their work, they were actually chased by an ambulance didn’t seem to faze them at all.
Jason pushed past me, back into the changing room.
I breathed out slowly through my mouth and walked on to fetch my coffee.
I had made a promise to myself not to ask any of the three jockeys anything about spot-fixing in racing, and this was one promise I intended keeping. No one else seemed to think it was happening anyway, and Grant had tried to convince me that I must be mistaken.
Except that I wasn’t.
26
The first race of the afternoon was uneventful as far as the medical team were concerned but, nevertheless, I relished being back in the Land Rover bouncing along behind the horses in a two-mile novice hurdle.
However, the second race, a handicap chase over three and a half miles and twenty-four fences, stretched us to the limit, even beyond it.
Eighteen runners went to post in a competitive Class 3 contest but only half were still standing at the finish. Of the other nine, three pulled up but six fell and four of the jockeys were injured.
The field was tightly bunched as they came past the grandstands with two complete circuits still to cover. My Land Rover was the second vehicle in the following train, immediately behind the lead ambulance.
‘Two fallers, first fence in the back straight,’ came the voice of the spotter in my earpiece. ‘Horses up, jockeys not.’
The Land Rover driver pulled the vehicle over onto the grass and I was quickly out the door and running. The lead ambulance had also stopped.
‘Doc two attending,’ I called into my radio.
‘And ambulance one,’ someone said into my ear.
‘Ambulance two taking over the lead.’
‘Doc one joining.’ I recognised that as Adrian.
I ducked under the running rail and sprinted across the grass to one of the two jockeys, while the paramedic team from the ambulance went to the other and the groundsmen followed on with their green privacy screens.
I went down on my knees next to the moaning figure.
‘Dr Rankin here,’ I said. ‘Where does it hurt?’
‘My left leg, doc. I think I heard it go crack.’
It was a woman’s voice.
Female jump jockeys had been riding against men since the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975 finally forced British racing to allow it, but they were still rare, there being only a handful of female professionals among several hundred of their male colleagues.
I smiled.
I, too, was a member of a profession that had initially tried to exclude women until Elizabeth Garrett Anderson had broken through the prejudice to become the country’s first female doctor. More than a hundred years later some 60 per cent of British medical students were now girls. Female jockeys clearly still had some way to go.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked.
‘Ellie Lowe,’ she said.
‘Did you hit your head at all, Ellie?’
Legs could wait but head and neck injuries could kill quickly.
‘No,’ she said. ‘It was an easy fall but my lower leg got landed on by one of the others.’
Ouch, I thought.
Horses were generally pretty good at avoiding human beings lying on the ground but sometimes there was nowhere else to go and the weight of a landing horse, acting through a slender metal-shod hoof, could do a lot of damage.
I gently examined her leg and she winced.
‘It’ll need an X-ray,’ I said. ‘I think you may have fractured your fibula above the ankle.’
‘Fuck,’ she said in a very unladylike manner. ‘Does that mean they’ll cut my boot off?’
‘Quite likely,’ I said.
‘Fuck,’ she said again. ‘They’re brand new and were bloody expensive.’
She seemed more concerned about her riding boots than her broken leg.
‘Doc two to spotter,’ I said into my radio. ‘Another ambulance needed here.’
‘Roger,’ came the reply. ‘On its way.’
The attendants were already dolling off the fence so it would be bypassed by the other runners next time round.
I looked across at the other fallen rider about four yards away, and the two paramedics who were still tending to him as he lay on the ground. I thought there was something quite urgent about their movements.
/> ‘Faller, downhill open ditch. Jockey still down.’ The spotter’s voice was loud in my ear.
‘Doc one attending,’ came the call from Adrian through the radio.
‘I’ve ordered an ambulance and stretcher for you,’ I said to my lady jockey. ‘The horses are bypassing this fence. Will you be OK for a second, Ellie? I want to check on him.’
I pointed at the other fallen rider.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Go ahead. I’m sure I can hop.’
‘No,’ I said firmly. ‘No hopping. Wait for the stretcher.’
I’d once had a patient arrive at A&E who, having broken one ankle, hopped across the waiting room when called and, while doing so, snapped the Achilles tendon in the other. The result had been both legs in plaster and eight weeks before he could walk again.
The other rider was Dick McGee and he wasn’t swearing about not winning this time. He was conscious but with wide frightened eyes.
‘Back injury,’ one of the paramedics said quietly to me as I went down on my knees next to him.
‘Hi, Dick,’ I said. ‘Dr Rankin here.’
‘Oh great, that’s all I need,’ he replied sardonically, which I took to be a good sign.
‘Stay still,’ I said to him. ‘We’re going to put a collar around your neck, just as a precaution.’
‘I can’t feel my legs, doc,’ he said, the worry etched deeply across his forehead.
‘It may just be spinal shock,’ I said, trying to be comforting. His back didn’t appear to be out of shape. ‘Sometimes a bang to the spine causes things to stop working for a short while. Don’t worry. Just let us look after you.’
One of the paramedics slid a plastic immobilisation collar gently under Dick’s neck and fastened it with Velcro under his chin.
‘Can you remember what happened?’ I asked.
‘Bloody nag hit the top and I went arse over tit. Landed flat on my back. Drove the bloody breath out of me, I can tell you.’
Flat was good, I thought.
I felt down his legs to check that there was no major injury there. If he couldn’t feel them then he wouldn’t be aware if one or both of his legs were broken.
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