by Tom McNab
“Afternoon, ma’am,” said the veteran, raising his right hand to his forehead. “Might you be looking for me to get you to Shot Gun inside three hours?”
Kate nodded.
“If you don’t mind me tagging along, Mr Fox.”
“Not at all,” said her companion. “Let’s see what we can do for you, at least for the first part.”
Fox turned out to be as good as his word, and took Kate through the first six miles in just over the hour. Surprisingly, the old man became garrulous, and during that first hour Kate was treated to the story of his life in professional foot-racing in the last part of the nineteenth century.
Fox told her of the six-day “wobbles” on the wooden indoor track at London’s Agricultural Hall, Islington, where Victorian runners had staggered round a two hundred and twenty yard track for six days on end. Fox had been the first to average a hundred miles a day in the “wobbles”, running six hundred and one miles in 1899.
“I still have the old Astley Belt for that ’un,” he said, wiping his watering eyes with the back of his hand.
And then there had been the big matches, against time, and in these Fox had been the first man, amateur or professional, to run twelve miles in the hour, at the old Hackney Wick ground the home of nineteenth-century London professional foot-racing.
There had also been the “man against man” matches, often for massive side bets. Twenty thousand Victorians or more would crowd into dank stadiums to watch George versus Myers, Hutchens versus Gent. Or Charles Fox versus Gannon, Watkins, Shrubb or any one of a dozen other great pedestrians.
“I won my gaffer plenty,” said Fox. “I was the best there was, in my day, when the money was on.”
Kate forgot her growing fatigue. “But where did all your money go, Mr Fox?” she asked.
Fox shrugged. “Training expenses. Gambling. Pubs. Ladies. Always had a lot of friends back in them days.”
He eased up as they approached the second feeding-station.
“Feeding time,” he said, pointing ahead. “Make sure you have a drink, miss. And eat. But don’t you take none of Mr Flanagan’s peanut sandwiches.” They both smiled.
As he moved slightly ahead, she looked down at his white legs, still surprisingly muscular but now heavily varicosed. The back of his vest had a dark patch of sweat and his red wrinkled neck ran with perspiration. Kate felt no pity for him, for the old man had no pity for himself. He was simply doing what he had done for forty years; what he had always done best.
Two miles ahead, Doc decided it was time to get closer to the leaders. Otherwise he could see himself nearly twenty minutes down on aggregate at the end of the third stage. There were something like five hundred hours of running ahead and only about twenty hours would be completed by the end of the day, but he could not afford to throw away time.
Morgan and Hugh sensed the change in pace, though neither said so to Doc. Gradually they moved away from the All-Americans, putting yard after yard between them.
Running beside them, Peter Thurleigh felt like an alien. He had never before met athletes like this; only dimly imagined the nature of such men and their lives, men who had spent every day since youth fighting towards the next day. It was a long way from Cambridge; from 20 March 1930, when it had all begun . . .
The Oxford versus Cambridge athletics match. March mists had been closing in on the stadium at Queen’s Club, and already some of the massive crowd were beginning to drift away as Peter Thurleigh had stood studying the first announcement in The Times of the Trans-America race. Peter had thrust his hands deep into his blazer pockets and wrapped his woollen scarf even more tightly round his neck. It had never been the best time of the year for a track and field meeting for the best athletes of Britain’s leading universities to compete, as a prelude to the summer track and field season. This was, however, tradition, just as Eton and Shrewsbury and the other public schools had pressed untrained boys into athletics in the bleak winter months before King Cricket took his throne.
Eton! Lord, in April 1920 he had run close to two minutes for a half-mile on its sodden turf. It had been half an hour before he had fully recovered consciousness and he had suffered black-outs for the rest of the day. This was not surprising, for he had come from the Rugby season into half-miling without a yard of training. Peter Thurleigh had always had the ability to run himself to oblivion, a quality later to stand him in good stead.
As he had stood in the empty stadium he had seen in his mind’s eye the trainer, old Sam White, shepherding the last of the Cambridge runners from the darkening field. Thirty years of students had, literally, passed through the hands of the gnarled old trainer. When he had first arrived at Cambridge in 1920, and had won the Freshers Mile, Peter had been massaged by Sam. “I do think you may have the makings, sir,” the old man had said then, gently kneading the undergraduate’s calves.
The makings: for the next three years Sam White had carefully threaded through the fabric of the young undergraduate’s mind years of running lore. These were ideas and attitudes passed on to Sam from a sepia world deep in the nineteenth century, from matches run by men in faded photographs standing forever frozen on their marks. At first, names like W. G. George, William Cummings and Charles Fox had meant nothing to Peter and when Sam went deeper into the nineteenth century and spoke of Deerfoot, of “The Gateshead Clipper” and of “Crowcatcher” Lang, it was as if the old man was describing a lost world.
It was in this world that Sam White had survived and triumphed, and from it that he drew the knowledge that was his strength, long after the spring and suppleness of his limbs had left him.
Three years with Sam had brought Peter Thurleigh from a staggering, goggle-eyed four minutes forty seconds novice in the Freshman Mile to the Stade Colombes in the 1924 Paris Olympics. Hundreds of miles on winter tracks, hour upon hour under those old hands smoothed by years of massage . . . and yet despite this intimacy they had never been close, and their discussions had borne only upon running. Peter had no idea if Sam White were married, had children, or even exactly where he lived. Sam was simply there. To him, White was part of that seamless continuum that existed only to serve. At home, the servants and gardeners, in autumn the ghillies on sour Scottish moors; their lives outside of service were of no concern to him.
In his final year, after his return from the Paris Olympics, he had arrived at the university track to find that Sam was not there, and had been directed by the groundsman to the old man’s home, a cottage a mile or so from the track. When he arrived at the cottage the door was unlocked, but Sam was not at home. He had pushed open the door and ventured into the dark cottage. The smell was appalling, a mixture of rotting food, excreta and stale sweat.
In the centre of the dank, stone-floored main room stood a rough wooden table on which lay a tin mug and a chipped plate containing the greasy remains of a meal. Sunk into the wall was a smouldering wood fire, in front of which stood a tin bath. On Peter’s right was a bed, its ruptured canvas mattress leaking straw on to the floor of the cottage. The place was a slum.
Peter moved uncertainly forward. On his left stood a sideboard which he found contained the fruits of Sam White’s professional career: the 1890 All Round Championship Belt, a discoloured brass belt composed of championship medals for one, three and six miles, linked by rotting, fading coloured braid; a yellowing cup for the World’s Ten Miles Championship, 1895; a few rusting and indecipherable medals. That was all, a lifetime of running. Peter Thurleigh stood for a moment fingering the tattered championship belt, trying to trace in the gloom of the cottage the lettering on some of the more obscure medals.
Something, a muffled sound perhaps – he wasn’t sure – made him turn round.
Sam White was standing behind him. He saw anger in Sam’s eyes, anger that vanished as the old man’s voice gave out its customary deferential tones. After that, relations between them had never been quite the same. Somehow he had crossed the line into another, forbidden world, a world in which
Sam wished to live alone.
Six years later, after he had decided to compete in the Trans-America, Peter Thurleigh went back to Cambridge to the old trainer to seek his advice. Sam was not at the track and Peter walked on to his cottage; but the building was no more than a pile of rubble. Neighbours told him that the old trainer had died a few months before. No, there was no gravestone; Sam White had been buried in a pauper’s grave. For some reason, Peter Thurleigh had wept.
In certain ways Doc was like Old Sam. But Doc Cole had a strength and confidence, even in some odd way a culture, that Sam had never possessed. Doc had spoken to him as an equal, but Peter did not yet know how to respond.
And Morgan. Morgan did not appear to acknowledge his existence. The American drove himself through each stage as if pushed on by some strong inner passion, sweat welling from the pores of his lean body like blood from a thousand wounds.
The Scot, McPhail, he could place, for he had met men like him before. His father had called them “Reds”, thus damning any man who had dared to challenge pay, working conditions, or the way society was run. McPhail’s resentment was almost palpable. Yes, undoubtedly a “Red”. Peter did not know how he could bear to live in the company of such men as these for the next three months.
Gradually they were sucking in the leading group, running easily and evenly over the baked and broken ground. Peter, too, had felt the change in pace, but decided to trust Doc, for he still had no idea of the speed that would be required to get from Los Angeles to New York. He would live from mile to mile, stage to stage, relying on his body to tell him what had to be done.
In front, Muller showed no signs of letting up, and took his drink at the final feeding-station, at fifteen miles, on the run, the water spilling as he ran. Eskola and Bouin stopped to drink, found difficulty in regaining their running rhythm, and were soon a couple of hundred yards down. The Finn shook his head and eased to a trot. Bouin kept going, the sweat glistening on his swarthy legs, but he could make no impression on the three leaders and found himself in a limbo between them and the trotting Pentti Eskola behind him.
Three miles back Charles Fox had done his work well, and had talked Kate through to twelve miles in just over two hours, twenty minutes. Even so, he could sense the American girl weaken. Kate’s breathing was no problem to her, but she could feel her legs becoming heavier, her hips dropping, her muscles become less and less capable of absorbing the broken contours of the soft road.
“You all right, miss?” he asked, increasingly aware that runner after runner was now passing him.
Kate nodded weakly, sweat breaking over her brow and biting her eyes.
“No problem,” she said. “Go on, Mr Fox.”
“See you at Shot Gun Camp then,” said Fox. “Just you keep it steady, mind, miss. Run through it.”
Even through her fatigue Kate was surprised to note, as Fox moved away from her, how slowly he appeared to be running. God only knew what she must look like! She stopped at the fifteen-mile feeding-point and stood for a moment amongst a dozen runners standing at the table, splashing a cup of water over her face and neck, and drinking two more cups. Kate looked desperately at her watch. Three hours two minutes: it had taken her nearly thirty-nine minutes to run the last three miles, an average of thirteen minutes a mile. This time she was finished. Done. It was all over.
In the lead, Muller, Martinez and Quomawahu now ran as one to the rhythmic chant of hundreds of Mojave Indians who had lined the final miles of the route to cheer on their champion.
Muller progressed grimly now, his face and shoulders streaming sweat, but still breathing evenly, if deeply. In contrast, Juan Martinez took in air in great sobbing gulps, his eyes wide and staring, while Quomawahu crawled his way ahead, occasionally grunting with fatigue. All ran at the same speed, and yet the outward expression of its cost was peculiar to each man.
Half a mile to go, and the chanting of the Mojaves by the side of the road became ever more insistent. As soon as he sighted the waiting buses at the finish Quomawahu responded by surging away, setting up a ten-yard lead. Soon it had stretched to thirty. The finish was now only a quarter of a mile away.
With a furlong to go, Martinez made a final desperate effort to catch the Indian, the rasping sound of his breathing drowned by the screaming of the massed Mojaves. But Quomawahu was too strong. Martinez could come in only second. Muller finished third, vomiting only seconds after he staggered past the line.
Doc and his group cruised in five minutes later, followed closely by the German and American teams.
Over three miles back Kate Sheridan was dying on her feet. She had never stopped running and her will was still strong, but somehow her body would no longer respond. She was empty. Her legs, sapped of life, had lost all rhythm. As each new runner passed her, Kate clung to him desperately, hanging on his shoulder, sucking a temporary strength and momentum from him, only to sink back into a broken struggle as she was dropped. Nothing in her past life provided her with the reference-point to demand a reply from muscles seemingly drained of energy.
She looked up ahead at a long, slight incline which had assumed the proportions of a mountain. Kate Sheridan’s feet were now barely clearing the ground, and she saw through the heat-haze, as in a mirage, a billowing stream of runners seemingly jogging on the spot, on the crest of the rise, moving away from her.
“Run, Kate, run!” said a voice in her head, as she laboured up the incline, spraying small stones to the sides of the road, her feet shuffling through the brown dust. “Run, Kate, run!” She heard herself answering through dry, split lips, her hips continuing to drop.
She groaned as she reached the top of the rise, stopping for a moment with hands on hips. When she tried to start again her legs would no longer support her. She fell, grazing both shoulders and elbows as she rolled down into the rough verge of the road. She turned on to her back, spitting dust from bleeding lips, and lay still. For a moment she thought she had lost her sight, for she was quite unable to focus and the salt sweat stung her eyes and seeped into her mouth. Then she saw two men above her. Two men with the same sweating face, looking down at her.
Both faces smiled and leant over her.
“Get up,” said a single voice.
Kate pushed herself up on to her elbows, shook her head, and continued to spit sand and dirt.
“Get up,” repeated the voice, this time more urgently.
Kate shook her head again.
Morgan slapped her hard across the face. The two images coalesced sharply into one.
“You son of a bitch,” she shouted, pushing herself up on one arm and rising unsteadily to her feet.
“Run, lady,” said Morgan. “You’ve got thirty-five minutes to run the next three miles. You can do it. Go!”
Kate Sheridan forced a crooked, wan smile, walked back up on to the road and started to move. They ran together, slowly at first, Kate adjusting her stride to Morgan’s rhythm. Out of the corner of her right eye she could just see his left shoulder, feel it suck her in towards their common goal, feel him as a magnet drawing her towards the finish.
Above them, a Pathé newsplane saw only a male runner and a young woman staggering uncertainly across the gathering gloom of the Mojave. As it made its way back to Los Angeles with film of the day’s dramatic finish the pilot closed in on the two runners and the cameraman finished his day’s film on the scene. Kate heard the noise of the plane’s engines above her, looked up and smiled, a broken smile. Perhaps, after all, she was going to make it.
An hour later Flanagan looked out of his caravan window as the last runners limped into camp.
“So how many beat the cut, Willard?” he asked.
“At the last count, twelve hundred and eighty,” said Willard, rising from his desk and consulting his clipboard.
Flanagan swore loudly. “Nearly a thousand gone in four days! This race is more like a massacre than a competition. What about the girl?”
“You mean Sheridan?” Willard flipped thr
ough the result-sheets. “She made it okay. All the other gals flunked out.”
“A pity,” said Flanagan. “The feminine interest sells a lot of papers. That means we got to find some new angle on the Sheridan girl to keep it alive. Make sure the press boys know Sheridan’s the only gal left. Maybe they’ll come up with something.”
“Done,” said Willard.
There was a knock at the door. Willard opened it to reveal the German team manager, Hans von Moltke. For a moment the German stood stiffly, as if on parade, then made a formal bow.
“Herr Flanagan, I regret to have to make protest.”
Flanagan beckoned to the German to sit down.
“Say your piece, Mr von Moltke.”
“What I have to say concerns Miss Sheridan,” said the German. “The American girl. Over the final part of the race she was – how do you say? – illegally assisted by another runner.”
“Illegally assisted?” said Flanagan. “Explain yourself, please.”
His visitor set his lips. “An American runner, Morgan, went back and ran with her to the finish. We therefore demand that both runners be disqualified.”
“Demand?” exploded Flanagan. “Did I understand you to say ‘demand ’?”
“Perhaps I use the wrong term,” said the German defensively. “Let me therefore say ‘request’.”
Flanagan beckoned to Willard to take some notes.
“Let me get this clear, Mr von Moltke,” he said. “Did Mr Morgan lift or carry Miss Sheridan?”
The German winced. “No. I am saying that he assisted her by – how you say? – pacing her over the last miles.”
“And that’s all you claim he did?” said Flanagan.
“Yes.”
Flanagan looked at Willard.
“Got that all down?” he asked. Willard nodded.
Flanagan rose. “Thank you, Herr von Moltke. I think I have all the essential details now. Rest assured I will let you know my decision in due course.”
The German opened his mouth as if to interject but decided against it. He bowed his cropped grey head and left the caravan.