Felix Francis - Crisis

‘I’m Fred Piper,’ said my newfound friend. ‘Been here pretty much all my life. The only one left now from old Mr Chadwick’s time. I don’t ride the horses these days, mind — hips and knees are bloody crocked.’ He grinned briefly, showing me several gaps in his teeth. ‘I just keep the place tidy now. Pass me that muck shovel, will you?’

I picked up the metal shovel that was leaning against the stable wall and handed it to him. He used it to collect what he’d been sweeping and put it in a wheelbarrow.

‘All I’m useful for these days is tidying.’

He sighed deeply and I thought there were tears in his eyes.

‘I’m sure Mr Chadwick is very pleased you are,’ I said.

‘Mr Chadwick senior might be,’ Fred said with surprising bitterness, ‘but young Mr Ryan isn’t. Wants me gone at the end of the month. Told me last week he couldn’t afford to pay me wages any more. I said I’d do the job for nothing. I’d be lost without it.’

‘Where do you live?’ I asked.

‘In the hostel,’ he replied gloomily. ‘Losing my home as well as my job. And no one’s going to give me another, not at my age. Castleton House Stables is all I know.’

‘How old are you?’ I asked.

‘Fifty-nine.’

He looked much older.

‘Where are you going to go?’

‘Dunno,’ Fred said. ‘Had hoped Mr Ryan would change his mind, but that won’t happen now. Not with seven less horses to look after. He laid off another two boys this morning. Told them to pack up and go, right there and then when they turned up for work at six o’clock. Bloody disgrace. Back in Mr Chadwick senior’s time we had a lad for every two horses. Treated like royalty, they were. Now it’s four per lad if you’re lucky, maybe five. Same everywhere.’

‘Do you have any family?’ I asked.

‘These are my family,’ he said, throwing his arm around. ‘These horses and those that went before them.’

At that point our conversation was interrupted by the return of several other horses into the barn, presumably back from Warren Hill, being led by other stable lads.

There was no banter at all. The animals were led silently into their stalls and their tack removed. They were given a brief rub-down and a cursory brush followed by having a rug thrown over their backs. Then the lads trudged off to prepare their next horse for the third lot, hardly lifting their eyes from the floor.

‘Not a very happy bunch, are they?’ I said to Fred Piper.

‘And why would they be?’ he said acidly. ‘They’re worried about their jobs. The yard hasn’t had a winner since Prince of Troy won the Guineas.’

‘But that’s only just over a week ago,’ I said.

‘A week is an age in racing. Never would have happened in Mr Chadwick senior’s days. Last Saturday, we had five runners at Lingfield with three more at Ascot and none of them were even close. Prince of Troy was our only hope and now he’s gone. Everyone’s wondering who’s next for the chop.’

‘How many staff have gone already?’ I asked.

‘Half a dozen or so in the past month.’

‘Where are they now?’

‘Some have found jobs with other trainers but many of those are cutting back on lad numbers too. More and more work riders are being used — mostly ex-jocks — which means the lads don’t actually ride the horses so they can spend more time mucking out. Some yards now have six or seven to a single lad. It’s crazy. How can you learn to love them when you’ve got seven to look after?’

He put out his hand and patted the head of a horse in one of the stalls on my left. The huge creature moved its head up and down as if it were agreeing with him.

‘The lads these days don’t seem to care as much as we old-timers do.’

The age-old gripe, I thought, of the elder towards the younger.

Was it true?

Maybe, but were things any worse for that? A racehorse was a working beast, bred and trained to run faster than its neighbour. Surely they weren’t pets to be loved and mollycoddled like a lapdog.

I personally had never owned an animal of any sort. I’d always had more than enough trouble from the humans in my life without taking on a being that couldn’t sit down and have a rational discussion about anything. Not that any members of my immediate family were in that category anyway.

My father always started an argument fairly coherently but quickly reverted to type, shouting down anyone with a view different from his.

If I contradicted him, which I invariably did, he would loudly accuse me of being a ‘stupid boy’ but without the affection and tolerance of Captain Mainwaring to Private Pike in Dad’s Army .

My mother was scarcely any better. If forty years of marriage to my father had taught her anything, it was to keep her own counsel and say nothing. Especially if she wanted a quiet life.

The only thing they appeared to agree on was that a move away from my nice secure job in a solicitors’ practice in rural Totnes to the cut-and-thrust, man-eats-man uncertainty of central London was a huge mistake, and very hurtful.

In spite of what ASW had said at our first meeting, I was now earning more than three times as much as I’d done in Totnes, and I loved my work infinitely more, but that was irrelevant as far as my parents were concerned. They only saw that I had forsaken them for the bright lights of the wicked metropolis.

And, if I were being honest, I would have to agree that one of my main motivations for seeking a change from the boredom of Totnes was indeed to put as many miles as possible between me and the family home.

London was far enough away to make a trip home for Sunday lunch very difficult, if not impossible, and I had managed to resist my mother’s pleas to come home for any weekend that wasn’t near Christmas or her birthday.

But I was not fooling myself. As an only child, I knew that it would come down to me to look after them eventually and, of course, I would then step up to the plate. But, until then, I would keep away as much as possible and hope that, when the Grim Reaper was ready, he would take them both swiftly before they became infirm and incontinent.

At least my parents had one child to care for them in their dotage. The prospects of me ever becoming a father seemed to be diminishing year on year.

For several years from my late twenties I’d had a regular but neurotic girlfriend and we had even rented a flat together. The romance had been steady rather than deeply exciting or passionate and had come to a dramatic end one night when I’d taken her to a smart restaurant in Torquay.

Having gone down on one knee and removed a very moderately priced solitaire diamond ring from my trouser pocket, I had popped the question only to be given a firm ‘Not bloody likely’ for an answer.

It seems that she had been planning for some time to end our relationship, as she longed for someone more aspirational than a country solicitor for a future husband. Little did she realise that it was her actions that night which spurred me on to seek out Simpson White less than a year later.

And, if the truth were told, I was more relieved than heartbroken, even at the time. Looking back now, I realise that we weren’t at all suited and I had only asked her to marry me because I naively believed it was the next logical step.

It had been a lucky escape and I sometimes still lay awake at night in a cold sweat, thanking my lucky stars that she had turned me down.

I’d moved out of our shared flat that very night and vowed never to ask the question of anyone unless I was absolutely certain that I couldn’t live without her for a single second longer. As a result, however, I’d since had a string of short-term liaisons with various girls, most of which I had finished almost as fast as they had started because I was in search only of Miss Perfect.