Silks Read Free Page B

never going to earn my living from race riding. For a start, despite my best efforts in refusing my school dinners, I hadgrown too tall and was already showing signs of becoming too heavy to be a professional jockey. Coupled with that was an apparent gift for academic success, and the fact that my future career in the law had been planned out to the n th degree by my father. He had decided that I would follow him to his old college at London University, then, like him, to the College of Law in Guildford and, finally, into the same firm of high-street solicitors that he himself had joined some thirty years previously. I would spend my life, like his, conveyancing property from seller to buyer, drawing up last wills and testaments, and untying the knots of failed marriages in south-west London suburbia. The promised boredom of it all had filled me with horror.
    I had been twenty-one and in my third year of a Bachelor of Laws degree at UCL when my darling mother had finally lost her long battle against leukaemia. Her death wasn’t a surprise to me, in fact she had lived far longer than any of the family had expected, but, perhaps for the first time, it brought home to me the fallibility and transitory nature of the human state. She died on her forty-ninth birthday. There had been no cutting of cake with blown-out candles, no singing of ‘Happy Birthday to You’. Just despair and tears. Lots and lots of tears.
    The experience made me resolve to do what I really wanted and not what everyone else expected of me. Life, I suddenly decided, was too short to waste.
    I had duly completed my degree, as it had somehow seemed a mistake to give it all up at such a late stage, but I had absolutely no intention of becoming a solicitor like my father. I had written to the College of Law to withdraw my application for the Legal Practice Course, the next step on the solicitors’ ladder, and, much to my remaining parent’s horror and anger, had arrangedinstead to go to Lambourn as unpaid assistant and amateur jockey with a mid-ranking racehorse trainer.
    ‘But how will you afford to live?’ my father had demanded in exasperation.
    ‘I will use the legacy that Mum left me,’ I’d replied.
    ‘But…,’ he had blustered. ‘That was meant to be for the down payment on a house.’
    ‘She didn’t say so in her will,’ I had said rather tactlessly, sending my father into a tirade about how the young these days had no sense of responsibility. This was not an uncommon rant in our household, and I was well used to ignoring it.
    So I had graduated in June and gone to Lambourn in July, and had used my mother’s legacy not only to pay my living expenses but also to acquire a seven-year-old bay gelding that I could ride in races, having correctly supposed that I was unlikely to get any rides on anyone else’s horses.
    I didn’t tell my father.
    August had mostly been spent getting fit. Each morning I would ride my horse in the stable string to the gallops on the hills above the village and then, each afternoon, I would run the same route on foot. By mid September both horse and jockey were showing signs of being ready for the racecourse.
    Quite by chance, or was it fate, my first ride in a proper race had been at Fontwell in early October that year. The whole experience had seemed to pass me by in a blur with everything happening at once. Such was my naivety and nervousness that I nearly forgot to weigh out, had been unprepared and badly left at the start, had struggled for a full circuit to get back to the other runners before fading badly due to my own lack of stamina towards the end. We had finished eleventh out of thirteen, and one of the two I had beaten only because he hadfallen in front of me at the last. It had not been an auspicious beginning. However the trainer had seemed relatively satisfied.
    ‘At least you didn’t fall off,’ he had said on our way home in his car.
    I had taken it as a compliment.
    My horse and I had raced