by Dick Francis
The loading was finished and the plane took off. There were thick dark red marks across my fingers an inch below the nails, and they throbbed all the way to America.
With us on that trip, looking after a full load of twelve horses, we took two other grooms, an elderly deaf one supplied by Yardman, and another man travelling privately with one particular horse. Owners occasionally sent their own grooms instead of entrusting their valued or difficult animals entirely to Yardman’s, and far from resenting it I had learned from Timmie and Conker to be glad of the extra help.
The horse involved on this occasion had come from Norway, stayed in England overnight, and was bound for a racing stable in Virginia. The new owner had asked for the Norwegian groom to go all the way, at his expense, so that the horse should have continuous care on the journey. It didn’t look worth it, I reflected, looking over at it idly while I checked the horses in the next box. A weak-necked listless chestnut, it had a straggle of hair round the fetlocks which suggested there had been a cart horse not far enough back in its ancestry, and the acute-angled hocks didn’t have the best conformation for speed. Norway was hardly famed for the quality of its racing any more, even though it was possibly the Vikings who had invented the whole sport. They placed heaps of valued objects (the prizes) at varying distances from the starting point: then all the competitors lined up, and with wild whoops the race began. The prizes nearest the start were the smallest, the furthest away the richest, so each rider had to decide what suited his mount best, a quick sprint or a shot at stamina. Choosing wrong meant getting no prize at all. Twelve hundred years ago fast sturdy racing horses had been literally worth a fortune in Norway, but the smooth skinned long legged descendants of those tough shaggy ponies didn’t count for much in the modern thoroughbred industry. It was sentiment, I supposed, which caused an American to pay for such an inferior looking animal to travel so far from home.
I asked the middle-aged Norwegian groom if he had everything he wanted, and he said, in halting, heavily accented English, that he was content. I left him sitting on his hay bale staring mindlessly into space, and went on with my rounds. The horses were all travelling quietly, munching peacefully at their haynets, oblivious to rocketing round the world at six hundred miles an hour. There is no sensation of speed if you can’t see an environment rushing past.
We arrived without incident at Kennedy airport, where a gum-chewing customs man came on board with three helpers. He spoke slowly, every second word an ‘uh’, but he was sharply thorough with the horses. All their papers were in order however, and we began the unloading without more ado. There was the extra job of leading all the horses through a tray of disinfectant before they could set foot on American soil, and while I was seeing to it I heard the customs man asking the Norwegian groom about a work permit, and the halting reply that he was staying for a fortnight only, for a holiday, the kindness of the man who owned the horse.
It was the first time I too had been to the States, and I envied him his fortnight. Owing to the five hours time difference, it was only six in the evening, local time, when we landed at Kennedy, and we were due to leave again at six next morning; which gave me about nine free hours in which to see New York. Although to my body mechanism it was already bedtime, I didn’t waste any of them in sleeping.
The only snag to this was having to start another full day’s work with eyes requiring matchsticks. Billy yawned over making the boxes as much as I did and only the third member of the team, the deaf elderly Alf, had had any rest. Since even if one shouted he could hear very little, the three of us worked in complete silence like robots, isolated in our own thoughts, with gaps as unbridgeable between us as between like poles of magnets. Unlike poles attract, like poles repel. Billy and I were a couple of cold Norths.
There was a full load going back again, as was usual on Yardman trips from one continent to another. He hated wasting space, and was accustomed to telephone around the studs when a long flight was on the books, to find out if they had anything to send or collect. The customers all liked it, for on full long distance loads Yardman made a reduction in the fares. Timmie and Conker had less cheerful views of this practice, and I now saw why. One’s body didn’t approve of tricks with the clock. But at the point of no return way out over the Atlantic I shed my drowsiness in one leaping heartbeat, and with horror had my first introduction to a horse going berserk in mid-air.
Old Alf shook my shoulder, and the fright in his face brought me instantly to my feet. I went where he pointed, up towards the nose of the aircraft.
In the second to front box a solidly muscled three-year-old colt had pulled his head collar to pieces and was standing free and untied in the small wooden square. He had his head down, his forelegs straddled, and he was kicking out with his hind feet in a fixed, fearful rhythm. White foamy sweat stood out all over him, and he was squealing. The companion beside him was trying in a terrified way to escape, his eyes rolling and his body pushing hard against the wooden side of the box.
The colt’s hooves thudded against the back wall of the box like battering rams. The wooden panels shook and rattled and began to splinter. The metal bars banding the sides together strained at the corner lynch pins, and it only needed one to break for the whole thing to start disintegrating.
I found the co-pilot at my elbow, yelling urgently.
‘Captain says how do you expect him to fly the aircraft with all this thumping going on. He says to keep that horse still, it’s affecting the balance.’
‘How?’ I asked.
‘That’s your affair,’ he pointed out. ‘And for God’s sake do something about it quickly.’
The back wall of the colt’s box cracked from top to bottom. The pieces were still held in place by the guy chains, but at the present rate they wouldn’t hold more than another minute, and then we should have on our minds a maddened animal loose in a pressurised aircraft with certain death to us all if he got a hoof through a window.
‘Have you got a humane killer on board?’ I said.
‘No. This is usually a passenger craft. Why don’t you bring your own?’
There were no rules to say one had to take a humane killer in animal transport. There should be. But it was too late to regret it.
‘We’ve got drugs in the first aid kit,’ the co-pilot suggested.
I shook my head. ‘They’re unpredictable. Just as likely to make him worse.’ It might even have been a tranquilliser which started him off, I thought fleetingly. They often backfired with horses. And it would be quite impossible in any case to inject even a safe drug through a fine needle designed for humans into a horse as wild as this.
‘Get a carving knife or something from the galley,’ I said. ‘Anything long and sharp. And quick.’
He turned away, stumbling in his haste. The colt’s hind feet smashed one broken half of the back wall clean out. He turned round balefully, thrust his head between the top and centre banding bars, and tried to scramble through. The panic in his eyes was pitiful.
From inside his jerkin Billy calmly produced a large pistol and pointed it towards the colt’s threshing head.
‘Don’t be a bloody fool,’ I shouted. ‘We’re thirty thousand feet up.’
The co-pilot came back with a white handled saw-edged bread knife, saw the gun, and nearly fainted.
‘D … don’t,’ he stuttered. ‘D … d … don’t.’
Billy’s eyes were very wide. He was looking fixedly at the heaving colt and hardly seemed to hear. All his mind seemed to be concentrated on aiming the gun that could kill us all.
The colt smashed the first of the lynch pins and lunged forwards, bursting out of the remains of the box like flood water from a dam. I snatched the knife from the co-pilot and as the horse surged towards me stuck the blade into the only place available, the angle where the head joined the neck.
I hit by some miracle the carotid artery. But I couldn’t get out of his way afterwards. The colt came down solidly on top of me, pouring blood,
flailing his legs and rolling desperately in his attempts to stand up again.
His mane fell in my mouth and across my eyes, and his heaving weight crushed the breath in and out of my lungs like some nightmare form of artificial respiration. He couldn’t right himself over my body, and as his struggles weakened he eventually got himself firmly wedged between the remains of his own box and the one directly aft of it. The co-pilot bent down and put his hands under my arm-pits and in jerks dragged me out from underneath.
The blood went on pouring out, hot sticky gallons of it, spreading down the gangways in scarlet streams. Alf cut open one of the hay bales and began covering it up, and it soaked the hay into a sodden crimson brown mess. I don’t know how many pints of blood there should be in a horse: the colt bled to death and his heart pumped out nearly every drop.
My clothes were soaked in it, and the sweet smell made me feel sick. I stumbled down the plane into the lavatory compartment and stripped to the skin, and washed myself with hands I found to be helplessly trembling. The door opened without ceremony, and the co-pilot thrust a pair of trousers and a sweater into my arms. His overnight civvies.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘Compliments of the house.’
I nodded my thanks, put them on, and went back up the plane, soothing the restive frightened cargo on the way.
The co-pilot was arguing with Billy about whether Billy would really have pulled the trigger and Billy was saying a bullet from a revolver wouldn’t make a hole in a metal aircraft. The co-pilot cursed, said you couldn’t risk it, and mentioned ricochets and glass windows. But what I wanted to know, though I didn’t ask, was what was Billy doing carrying a loaded pistol round with him in an underarm holster as casually as a wallet.
Chapter Five
I slept like the dead when I finally got home, and woke with scant time the next morning to reach Kempton for the amateurs’ chase. After such a mangling week I thought it highly probable I would crown the lot by falling off the rickety animal I had in a weak moment promised to ride. But though I misjudged where it was intending to take off at the last open ditch and practically went over the fence before it while it put in an unexpected short one, I did in fact cling sideways like a limpet to the saddle, through sheer disinclination to hit the ground.
Though I scrambled back on top, my mount, who wouldn’t have won anyway, had lost all interest, and I trotted him back and apologised to his cantankerous owner, who considered I had spoilt his day and was churlish enough to say so. As he outranked my father by several strawberry leaves he clearly felt he had the right to be as caustic as he chose. I listened to him saying I couldn’t ride in a cart with a pig-net over it and wondered how he treated the professionals.
Julian Thackery’s father caught the tail end of these remarks as he was passing, and looked amused: and when I came out of the weighing room after changing he was leaning against the rails waiting for me. He had brought the list of entries of his horses, and at his suggestion we adjourned to the bar to discuss them. He bought me some lemon squash without a quiver, and we sat down at a small table on which he spread out several sheets of paper. I realised, hearing him discussing his plans and prospects, that the year by year success of his horses was no accident: he was a very able man.
‘Why don’t you take out a public licence?’ I said finally.
‘Too much worry,’ he smiled. ‘This way it’s a hobby. If I make mistakes, I have no one on my conscience. No one to apologise to or smooth down. No need to worry about owners whisking their horses away at an hour’s notice. No risk of them not paying my fees for months on end.’
‘You know the snags,’ I agreed dryly.
‘There’s no profit in training,’ he said. ‘I break even most years, maybe finish a little ahead. But I work the stable in with the farm, you see. A lot of the overheads come into the farm accounts. I don’t see how half these public trainers stay in business, do you? They either have to be rich to start with, or farmers like me, or else they have to bet, if they want a profit.’
‘But they don’t give it up,’ I pointed out mildly. ‘And they all drive large cars. They can’t do too badly.’
He shook his head and finished his whisky. ‘They’re good actors, some of them. They put on a smiling not-a-care-in-the-world expression at the races when they’ve got the bank manager camping on their door-step back home. Well, now,’ he shuffled the papers together, folded them, and tucked them into a pocket. ‘You think you can get next Thursday off to go to Stratford?’
‘I’m pretty sure of it, yes.’
‘Right. I’ll see you there, then.’
I nodded and we stood up to go. Someone had left an Evening Standard on the next table, and I glanced at it casually as we passed. Then I stopped and went back for a closer look. A paragraph on the bottom of the front page started ‘Derby Hope Dead,’ and told in a few bald words that Okinawa, entered for the Derby, had died on the flight from the United States, and was consequently scratched from all engagements.
I smiled inwardly. From the lack of detail or excitement, it was clear the report had come from someone like the trainer to whom Okinawa had been travelling, not from airport reporters sniffing a sensational story. No journalist who had seen or even been told of the shambles on that plane could have written so starkly. But the horse had been disposed of now, and I had helped wash out the plane myself, and there was nothing to see any more. Okinawa had been well insured, a vet had certified that destroying him was essential, and I had noticed that my name on the crew list was spelled wrongly; H. Gray. With a bit of luck, and if Yardman himself had his way, that was the end of it. ‘My dear boy,’ he’d said in agitation when hurriedly summoned to the airport, ‘it does business no good to have horses go crazy on our flights. We will not broadcast it, will we?’
‘We will not,’ I agreed firmly, more for my sake than for his.
‘It was unfortunate’ he sighed and shrugged, obviously relieved.
‘We should have a humane killer,’ I said, striking the hot iron.
‘Yes. Certainly. All right. I’ll get one.’
I would hold him to that, I thought. Standing peacefully in the bar at Kempton I could almost feel the weight of Okinawa and the wetness of his blood, the twenty-four hour old memory of lying under a dying horse still much too vivid for comfort. I shook myself firmly back into the present and went out with Julian’s father to watch a disliked rival ride a brilliant finish.
Saturday night I did my level best to be civil to Mother’s youngest female week-end guest, while avoiding all determined manoeuvres to leave me alone with her, and Sunday morning I slid away before dawn northwards to Lincolnshire.
Tom Wells was out on the apron when I arrived, giving his planes a personal check. He had assigned me, as I had learned on the telephone the previous morning, to fly three men to Glasgow for a round of golf. I was to take them in an Aztec and do exactly what they wanted. They were good customers. Tom didn’t want to lose them.
‘Good-morning, Harry,’ he said as I reached him. ‘I’ve given you Quebec Bravo. You planned your route?’
I nodded.
‘I’ve put scotch and champagne on board, in case they forget to bring any,’ he said. ‘You’re fetching them from Coventry – you know that – and taking them back there. They may keep you late at Gleneagles until after dinner. I’m sorry about that.’
‘Expensive game of golf,’ I commented.
‘Hm,’ he said shortly. ‘That’s an alibi. They are three tycoons who like to compare notes in private. They stipulate a pilot who won’t repeat what he hears, and I reckon you fit that bill, Harry my lad, because you’ve been coming here for four years and if a word of gossip has passed your lips in that time I’m a second class gas fitter’s mate.’
‘Which you aren’t.’
‘Which I’m not.’ He smiled, a pleasant solid sturdy man of forty plus, a pilot himself who knew chartering backwards and ran his own little firm with the minimum of fuss. Ex-R.A.F., of course, as
most flyers of his age were: trained on bombers, given a love for the air, and let down with a bang when the service chucked them out as redundant. There were too many pilots chasing too few jobs in the post-war years, but Tom Wells had been good, persistent and lucky, and had converted a toe-hole co-pilot’s job in a minor private airline into a seat on the board, and finally, backed by a firm of light aircraft manufacturers, had started his present company on his own.
‘Give me a ring when you’re leaving Gleneagles,’ he said, ‘I’ll be up in the Tower myself when you come back.’
‘I’ll try not to keep you too late.’
‘You won’t be the last.’ He shook his head. ‘Joe Wilkins is fetching three couples from a week-end in Le Touquet. A dawn job, that’ll be, I shouldn’t wonder …’
I picked up the three impressive business men as scheduled and conveyed them to Scotland. On the way up they drank Tom Wells’ Black and White and talked about dividend equalisation reserves, unappropriated profits, and contingent liabilities: none of which I found in the least bit interesting. They moved on to exports and the opportunities available in the European market. There was some discussion about ‘whether the one and three-quarters was any positive inducement,’ which was the only point of their conversation I really understood.
The one and three quarters, as I had learned at Anglia Bloodstock, was a percentage one could claim from the Government on anything one sold for export. The three tycoons were talking about machine tools and soft drinks, as far as I could gather, but the mechanism worked for bloodstock also. If a stud sold a horse abroad for say twenty thousand pounds, it received not only that sum from the buyer, but also one and three quarters per cent of it – three hundred and fifty pounds – from the Government. A carrot before the export donkey. A bonus. A pat on the head for helping the country’s economy. In effect, it did influence some studs to prefer foreign buyers. But racehorses were simple to export: they needed no after sales service, follow-up campaign or multi-lingual advertising, which the tycoons variously argued were or were not worth the trouble. Then they moved on to taxation and I lost them again, the more so as there were some lowish clouds ahead over the Cheviots and at their request I was flying them below three thousand feet so that they could see the countryside.