I never rode in a race; all my trackwork riding was in the last century, but it stays as a bright glow in the archives of my memory.
The summer I went to pick apricots for a holiday job, in Hawke’s Bay, in 1975, I wasn’t thinking of riding at all, and I didn’t even know there was a racecourse until we drove past it down Southland Road. But when I clapped eyes on Cedric Shield, bent and bowlegged, his nose on the piss, and he was only my height as well, I thought, jockey.
He might have been old, but he was spry, and I followed him down a line of apricot trees until he stopped and stared down at the base of one.
“I had a sheep here with fly-blow,” he said conversationally. “I sprayed it with Black Flag. It said on the tin ‘Kills anything’,” he said, peering up at me with his rheumy eyes, checking my face.
“Killed it all right!” he said, with a great cackle of glee.
I laughed.
We left the trees and went to the stables, and Ceddy stroked the forelock of a tall chestnut, and the racing saddles were hanging on pegs, and the ropes on the walls, and it smelt warm, horse dusty. I was a moth to the flame. I watched while he fitted the small racing saddle with forward-cut flaps. You need those to fold your legs up on, cos, very short stirrups. He could tell I wanted to. He stroked the horse’s shoulder, bent down and absently ran his fingers down the tendon, then looked up, very serious.
“It gets in your blood,” he said, fixing me with his eye like the Ancient Mariner. “You won’t be able to leave.”
I stared at his battered face, trying to see if he meant it, and he stared at me. You could clearly see the snap in the bone of his nose; the kink where it bent sideways.
“Okay,” I said.
I never picked a single apricot, and I never made any money either; I rode down Southland Road with Ceddy—it was when you still could ride in traffic—and learned how to ride trackwork, and my days turned into early mornings, changing my life for always.
It took five more summers before I got itchy again for a ride, and I turned my eye to Ted Laxon. His farm was just down the stopbank, behind the school and the rugby grounds in Taradale. He had a small farm track in his back paddock, smothered in sheep. “They’ll get out of the way,” he said, and I thought of what Dad would say and said nothing.
I write some things because I like to remember them. Like swishing along on the stopbank on my bike under the lightening stars, the stable light spilling out in a square. The smells, crisp when no one stirs, of molasses and sweet lucerne in the feed room, horse piss sharp in the straw. The thud of hooves, the snorts, loud in the clear still air, the corners where river mist coils, the stars as they fade into day. The worry of the white shape of sheep when it’s not quite light enough to see them.
The last time I rode out (that’s what you say, for riding trackwork in England; I’m showing off) was in early spring, in 1982, and I didn’t know it was for the last time. We were staying with Jeanne and John Smith (related by marriage, not blood) in Devon—and looking for work.
Most days I walked down in the sand dunes with John and the dogs, then on to the pub for a pint and to William Hill for a punt and watched the races on TV in the afternoon. I couldn’t get over myself, watching famous races at Newmarket, like the July Cup and the 2000 Guineas, and the Rowley Mile, with the Devil’s Dyke running along the background. I already knew Newmarket from Dick Francis books: murderers chasing the main man round the Heath and so on; also, my great-ancestor Moore was known (thrillingly) as the Regicide, because he signed the death warrant of Charles 1, which paved the way for jolly old King Charlie 2 to build the racecourse at Newmarket, and move his court there to bet on horses, thus founding the British racing industry.
When a job interview came up for domestic staff in Newmarket, it might as well have been hallowed in stars. We figured we’d go to the interview at least, and look at the racecourse and the horse walks and the Jockey Club buildings. It’s racing HQ, no less: a much better bet than Buckingham Palace.
The job was for Terry Ellis, who we didn’t know from Adam, but he told us he owned Chrysalis Records, and he needed someone fast. We already knew; the lady down the pub told us his cook had upped sticks and gone, and she was feeding his dog every day. He told us sometimes Paul McCartney and Wings stayed there, sometimes Debbie Harry. I said that was interesting, but I’d only take the job if he could sort me out a stable to ride in. He said he had seven racehorses in training with Patrick Haslam, and if we took the job, he’d get him to let me ride out in the string. If I kept it secret from his wife, who wouldn’t like it. The string. I love the sound of that. Some trainers take their horses out in lots of fifty at a time—unheard of in New Zealand—and they never ride upsides; it’s always in single file.
Everyone in the string wears the stable colours on their skull cap; I was beside myself with joy when they gave me one.
It was ice-palace cold, the hoar frosts just starting to thaw and drip ice from the black branches in the hedgerows, when I started at the yard. It was all so very Dick Francis, the Georgian brick building that the Governor lived in (he shouted instructions down to the lads in the yard from the upper windows). Lads—I was a lad! I was going to ride out on the Heath, where racing as we know it started. I was there in hundred-year-old wooden stables, overcome and trying to pretend to be normal. Peter, the Head Lad, took me into the box where a horse was tacked up, and when I squatted to tighten the girth, I saw balls.
Dad: Never trust a stallion.
Peter saw the look on my face and said, dubiously, “You can ride, can’t you?”
We were only hacking along (another phrase I like to say, from all the pony books I read as a kid: it only means walking) the local lanes while the ground was softening. The colt did a squeal and an almighty pig-root to test the waters, but he was a softie, really, and walked sweetly down the hedgerows.
It was right at the start of the flat season, and the stable had only forty-eight horses in training. It took a while for people to notice the streak of winners, and they came in at long odds for at least three weeks. Peter told me when to put the money on. It was his way of paying me, because although I was there for fun—happy as a pig in shit—I was doing real work, riding three lots a day with the string. He was the best judge of a horse: the only reliable tipster I’ve ever known. The lads talked their own horses up, but they were all piss and wind; Peter was bang on the money. And better, he’d tell me when not to bet. I’d put on my piddly five each way, and ring up John in Devon, and he’d put 100 quid on the nose, meaning, to win.
I was a novelty in the stable, the only female, and my accent—well, they loved taking the piss while we were riding along the streets in single file, on our way to the Heath. “Say pin,” they’d yell out, “Say six.” They never got enough of six.
They called out good things when Peter put me up on Godstone, the big Group winning star of the stable. Group Races are top tier races that every trainer, jockey and owner dreams of bagging. Patrick Haslam, called Guv’nor by the lads (I called him something less respectful in my head), wasn’t there that morning, and I guess it was Peter’s sense of natural justice. I couldn’t believe it when he said I was riding Rocky (Godstone’s stable name). And—it seems incredible thinking of it now—Peter let me lead, setting the pace for the whole string. He said, “Just let him bowl along. He knows how fast to go; he’s a true professional.”
The horse carried himself like a king, long and loping and well sprung. He knew what he was. “Don’t think you’re going to get your arse on Rocky again,” muttered his regular lad, on a middling horse behind. “He’s my horse.” He wasn’t joking.
Godstone was an entire (an entire hasn’t been cut, but is not yet a stallion because he hasn’t served mares, which is what it sounds like: the most expensive three seconds in breeding). Fully developed in the neck and chest, which geldings aren’t, he had a big, powerful shoulder to perch behind, and a massive rear end; a tractor of a horse. I let out an inch and bang—Ferrari. I literally thought that, so powerfully, so smoothly did he go up the gears. He hit three-quarter pace in a couple of bounds; didn’t pull, just stayed there, his muscular neck light in my hands. I still think of it all these years later. To ride a horse like that, even once.
We went back to New Zealand after four more years, and when I had kids, I factored in paralysis and death, for once, and didn’t think about riding at all.
Twenty-five years later, we went to see John, in his nursing home. “He won’t know you,” Jeanne warned us. He was sitting in his chair, smiling gently and nodding vaguely when we were taken to him. She said, “It’s Marty and Phil.”
Something sparked, far inside his brain. The blue in his eyes changed, deepened. “Marty,” he said, and a smile twitched.
“We made a lot of money,” he said, all there. “Didn’t we?” He delighted in it for a moment or so before he drifted. A woman in a wheelchair rolled herself up to announce there was jam roly-poly for lunch, and then the talk became consumed by puddings.
Taken with kind permission from a book published today, and already in-demand, It Gets In Your Blood: Lives of a racecourse by Marty Smith (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $40), available in bookstores nationwide. It traces the author’s 10 years of immersing herself in the world of thoroughbred horse racing in the Hawke’s Bay; the book is an intimate portrait of that hardworking, romantic industry.
