Longshot

‘I’ll just get my gloves.’ He checked also that I had gloves. ‘It’s as cold as I’ve ever known it. We won’t stay out long, the wind’s terrible. Come along.’

As we went through the hall I asked him about the feeding.

‘Bob Watson comes at six,’ he said briefly. ‘All horses in training get an early-morning feed. High protein. Keeps them warm. Gives them energy. A thoroughbred on a high-protein diet generates a lot of heat. Just as well in weather like this. You rarely find a bucket of water frozen over in a horse’s box, however cold it is outside. Mind you,’ he said, ‘we do our best to stop draughts round the doors, but you have to give them fresh air. If you don’t, if you molly-coddle them too much, you get viruses flourishing.’

As we stepped out into the open, the wind pulled his last words away and sucked the breath out of our lungs and I reckoned we were still dealing with perhaps ten degrees of frost, plus chill factor, the same as the evening before. It wouldn’t go on freezing for as long as in 1963, I thought: that had been the coldest winter since 1740.

A short walk took us straight into the stable-yard, dark the night before and dimly seen, now lit comprehensively and bustling with activity.

‘Bob Watson,’ Tremayne said, ‘is no ordinary head lad. He has all sorts of skills, and takes pride in them. Any odd job, carpentering, plumbing, laying concrete, anything to improve the yard and working conditions, he suggests it and mostly does it himself.’

The object of this eulogy came to meet us, noticing I wore the ski-suit, acknowledging my thanks.

‘All ready, guv’nor,’ he said to Tremayne.

‘Good. Bring them out, Bob. Then you’d better be off, if you’re going to Reading.’

Bob nodded and gave some sort of signal and from many open doors came figures leading horses; riders in hard helmets, horses in rugs. In the lights and the dark, with plumes of steam swirling as they breathed, with the circling movements and the scrunching of icy gravel underfoot, the great elemental creatures raised in me such a sense of enjoyment and excitement that I felt for the first time truly enthusiastic about what I’d set my hand to. I wished I could paint, but no canvas, and not even film, could catch the feeling of primitive life or the tingle and smell of the frosty yard.

Bob moved through the scene giving a leg-up to each lad and they resolved themselves into a line, perhaps twenty of them, and processed away through a far exit, horses stalking on long strong legs, riders hunched on top, heads bobbing.

‘Splendid,’ I said to Tremayne, almost sighing.

He glanced at me. ‘Horses get to you, don’t they?’

‘To you too? Still?’

He nodded and said, ‘I love them,’ as if such a statement were no more than normal, and in the same tone of voice went on,’ As the jeep’s in the ditch we’ll have to go up to the gallops on the tractor. All right with you?’

‘Sure,’ I said, and got my introduction to the training of steeplechasers perched high in a cab over chain-wrapped wheels which Tremayne told me had been up to the Downs with his groundsman once already that morning to harrow the tracks and make them safe for the horses to walk on. He drove the tractor himself with the facility of long custom, spending most of his time not looking where he was going but at anything else visible around him.

His house and stables, I discovered, were right on the edge of the grassy uplands so that the horses had merely to cross one public road to be already on a downland track, and the road surface itself had been thinly covered with unidentified muck to make the icy crossing easier.

Tremayne waited until his whole string was safely over before following them at enough distance not to alarm them, then they peeled off to the right while we lumbered onwards and upwards over frozen rutted mud, making for a horizon that slowly defined itself out of shadows as the firmament grew lighter.

Through the wind Tremayne remarked that perfectly still mornings on the long east-west sweep of downland across Berkshire and Wiltshire were as rare as honest beggars. Apart from that the day broke clear and high with a pale grey washed sky that slowly turned blue over the rolling snow-dusted hills. When Tremayne stopped the tractor and the silence and isolation crept into the senses, it was easy to see that this was what it had looked like up here for thousands of years, that this primordial scene before our present eyes had also been there before man.

Tremayne prosaically told me that if we had continued up over the next brow we would have been close to the fences and hurdles of his schooling ground where his horses learned to jump. Today, he said, they would be doing only half-speed gallops on the all-weather track, and he led the way on foot from the tractor across a stretch of powdery snow to a low mound from where we could see a long dark ribbon of ground winding away down the hill and curving out of sight at the bottom.