Memories of Kauto.

The sun is shining and I’m determined to mine the beauty and the joy out of this day. I spent time with my sweet mares, drove round the Scottish hills to look at the snow, went to see the dear Stepfather, and then ran home to watch the racing. Many of my old friends are out today, and my heart is beating with love.

Four years ago today, I watched Kauto Star line up for the Betfair Chase. I was with the Beloved Cousin and her small children and my dear old dog, known on this blog as The Pigeon. The consensus on the day was that Kauto’s glory days were behind him. Some people were even quite cross that Paul Nicholls was running him.

I wrote about that day, and I’m reproducing it here because my memories of the bold and beautiful Kauto Star will never die. I’m thinking a lot about the people who are not here any more; that glorious horse is not here any more. I hope they are all running their race on some celestial track, with the emerald turf springy under their feet.

The story of a great race:

(There was a rather long introduction about having chard from the garden for lunch, and about my love for Master Minded, who was also running. Only then did I get to the main action, which is why the start sounds slightly abrupt.)

Kauto Star is eleven, which is old in racing years. Not geriatric, but a sure veteran. The young pretender, Long Run, had come last season and taken the Gold Cup. Worst of all, he had usurped Kauto Star’s crown in the race he had made his own, the King George at Kempton. Bear in mind Kauto is the only horse in history who had won that race four years in a row, the last time by over 30 lengths, against some of the best chasers in the country.

He is the mightiest and most beloved champion since Desert Orchid: first horse ever to win a Gold Cup, lose a Gold Cup, and come back to regain it; the first horse ever to win fourteen group one races. There was a time when he seemed almost unbeatable. In his early days, he used to put in terrifying mistakes, quite often over the last fence when it seemed as if he had everything sewn up; in his later years, he could put in exhibition rounds, making such mighty leaps that it seemed as if he had wings.

The thought was, though, that his great days were all behind him. People were muttering about retirement. Today, he was facing three tough miles, up against much younger horses, at least four of whom had big wins under their belts. He might fall, be pulled up, get tailed off; the talk was that if he did not run well today, he would be retired on the spot, and that is the last we would all see of him.

I’ll give my hero another chance, I thought. I’ll just put on a little twenty, I thought, mostly out of love. I was not sure he could do it. Long Run is a very, very good horse. I was acting on sentiment. Then I got a bit more forensic. Paul Nicholls had trained Kauto to the minute for this race; Long Run would be being saved for later in the season, and often does not run well first time out. I’ve always thought there is a little question mark over his jumping; he can go a bit flat and careless when the pressure is on.

I examined the form. There were definite drawbacks over another of the two main dangers. Damn it, I thought; this really could be Kauto’s moment. Five minutes before the race, I put on another twenty. Sod them all, I thought: my boy is not done yet.

I explained some of all this to the children. They got very excited. They watched the quick replays of his earlier triumphs that Channel Four was showing, and decided they loved him.

‘Come on Kauto,’ they said.

Off the horses went. Kauto Star was jumping very well, but almost stupidly well, standing off outside the wings. I was worried he would take too much out of himself.

The lovely Ruby Walsh, his regular jockey, took him to the lead, and kept him there. He can’t stay in front for three miles, I thought, not at his age. But he kept pinging his fences and was bowling along as if he did not have a care in the world. Ruby was so relaxed half the time he seemed to be riding with just one hand. It was delightful to see the two old pros in such perfect tune with each other.

‘Maybe he can do it,’ I said.

‘Come on, Kauto,’ cried the children.

‘No,’ I said. ‘He can’t do it. It’s too much to ask.’

But Long Run was making mistakes, and running a little ragged. Kauto was collected and foot perfect. He’ll fade, I thought. The younger fellas will come and pick him up.

Into the last four fences. I was on my feet. ‘Come on my son,’ I shouted.

‘Come on, Kauto,’ yelled the children.

The Pigeon was also on her feet, barking her head off, which is what she always does when I shout at the racing.

Three out. Kauto Star still in the lead, against all the odds. At this stage, I actually jumped onto an armchair and was bawling my head off. ‘Come on, you beauty,’ I yelled.

The Pigeon was jumping up and down on all fours.

‘Come on, come on,’ shouted the children.

The younger horses were gathering themselves for their final effort. Ruby still had not asked Kauto the question. ‘Oh, just steady,’ I shouted. ‘Just stand up.’

The great Ruby Walsh kept the old horse balanced and straight and steady, using only hands and heels, preserving all his energy for the final push. Everyone else was scrubbing away. I suddenly thought the mighty champion could do it.

Over the last, everything else faded away. Kauto was tired, but he’s not only a once in a generation talent, he’s got enormous courage. He does not give up. He just went on galloping to the line, brave and true, seven lengths in front.

The crowd went nuts. Paul Nicholls jumped in the air for joy. Ruby Walsh fell on the horse’s neck, hugging him. I was shouting and crying. The children were yelling yes, yes. The Beloved Cousin looked at me in amazement. ‘He looks as if he could go round again,’ she said.

The King was back in his castle. He walked back to the winning enclosure, his ears pricked, his head held high. The crowd gave him three cheers, twice. No one could quite believe it. It was one of the best things I ever saw in racing.

So, it went from an ordinary day to an extraordinary win from a most remarkable horse. I wish my dad had been here to see it.

 

Today’s pictures:

My own little shining star:

Stanley the very Manly:

A good day.

Sometimes, I fall into a defensive crouch. I put so much pressure on myself that I go into a kind of awful tunnel vision. It is dark in the tunnel, and the critical voices in my head like it in there and use it as a kind of echo chamber. Magical thinking, which I try to resist, lifts its head and senses its opportunity, and tells me that I shall never come to any good.

As I wrangle and struggle with my book, I see only the things which are not there. It will never be good enough, I am not good enough to make it good enough, the agent will know it is not good enough and will have to tell me so.

Then a shift in perspective comes, and I go back to the beginning, with clear eyes. Today, my eyes were clear. I started the editing all over again. I could see very well what needed to be done, and I did it. And I found, to my astonishment, that some of it was really not bad.

Just because I think it is good does not mean other people will too. Writing is a subjective business. One is always dependent on someone else’s opinion. There is no certainty, and this is part of what wears away at the troubled, questing, hopeful mind.

But today I know that all the work I have done is worth it, even if I do get rejected. That counts for something.

In the morning, before work, before thought, I ring The Beloved Cousin. At the very sound of her voice, I know that every single thing will be all right. She has that miraculous effect.

Friendship, I think, as I ride out later into the mild Scottish day, the air gentle against my face, never gets the press it deserves. It’s always romantic love which has the classic novels written about it, the songs, the poems, the plays, the films, the sonnets. But friend love, for me, is the one that saves your life, lifts your heart, restores your sanity, confirms your sense of self.

The Beloved Cousin understands every single word I say, laughs at my jokes, unpicks my troubles as if they were her own, makes me feel like a better human, remembers all the things I have forgotten, does not mind whether I am up, down or round the houses, expects me to be nothing but my own flawed, flaky self. She just gets it. (In this case, It is everything.)

As if determined to continue the love and loveliness, the red mare was at her absolute, shining, glittering crest and peak. She rode like a dream, was funny and dear, and showed off her dressage diva trot all the way down the lime avenue, with no reins and no stirrups. She seems to find it mildly amusing that I kick my feet out of the irons and wave my arms in the air, and boxes along in her best self-carriage whilst I laugh with delight.

And then there was the good work and I backed a ten-to-one winner at Goodwood as the ravishing Malabar, the only filly in the race, put the boys in their place, kicking away and streaking down the straight, her beautiful bay coat gleaming in the sun.

There are bad days, and good days. I like to record the good days, because when the shadows come, I find it soothing to look back and remember what the light is like. Today was all light.

A shining light. Or, some thoughts on friendship.

I ring up the Beloved Cousin.

‘Oh,’ she exclaims. ‘I miss you.’

‘I miss you too,’ I shout.

‘I was only thinking, just the other day,’ she said, ‘that I miss you. It was something that made me laugh, that I knew would make you laugh too.’

The Beloved Cousin and I are quite distant cousins. Our great-grandfathers were brothers. Our grandmothers knew each other quite well, and our fathers met as boys, but then went in radically different directions, one into racing, one into politics. So, in the end, we met quite by chance, when we were in the same university town at the age of eighteen. It took a while. She was very glamorous and went to London a lot. I was a bit of a swot and spent most of my time discovering new libraries. (The day I found the Codrington was the day I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.) I did go dancing in the evening, because it was the eighties and we really did go disco dancing, but for quite a long time I was more of a History Faculty sort of gal. And then our worlds, which had always slightly overlapped, came together, and suddenly, almost from one day to the next, we were friends, and that was that.

Thirty years, give or take. Imagine that. We’ve driven across Ireland together, and flirted with poets and piano players and a famous old politico, who appeared out of nowhere rather to everyone’s surprise. We were together on the Worst Holiday in the World, when a group of twelve of us crammed into what was advertised as a Spanish villa, and turned out to be a house the size of a postage stamp, situated opposite a 24-hour petrol station. The fallings out started within half an hour and by the end no-one was speaking to anyone, except for the cousin and I.

We’ve bitten our lips as we watched each other fall in and out of love with entirely unsuitable gentlemen. I would drive down to Brighton to see her in rep, in her acting days, and she would be by my side at each book launch. We’ve stayed up till dawn and watched the sun rise, and now, in our middle-age, we put on our slippers and have a glass of the good claret and take grateful old lady early nights.

We’ve spent Christmases and Easters and New Years together. We’ve shouted them past the post at Ascot and roared them up the hill at Cheltenham. Our eyes have met in speaking understanding across dinner tables filled with crashing bores (and crashing boors). I saw the very first smile of her second daughter, at three weeks old, and to this day, we all say, in unison: ‘It was not wind.’ On the night of my father’s funeral, it was she who took me in. Three weeks later, I drove her the two hundred miles home from her brother’s funeral.

In those thirty years, I think we’ve had one falling out. It lasted for about two hours, and once we talked over the misunderstanding and almost wept with relief, we never did it again.

Our lives are stupidly busy, and our schedules are quite different, and we spend a lot of time thinking we should ring and then not ringing because it’s not the right moment, so when we spoke this morning we had not heard each other’s voices for a few weeks. Within four minutes, we were laughing so much we could not breathe or talk. We were laughing at two memories, ranging back over many years, because we’ve got so much history together, so many stories, so many disasters and heartbreaks and muddles and absurdities. The amazing thing is that even the heartbreaks make us laugh now.

When I was very young, I suspected that someone, somewhere, had made a bit of a category error. Into the category of indispensible things, of defining fulfilments, that someone had put romantic love. It also went very much into the Woman category. That was the thing that the ladies could not do without. Men, the swaggery adventurers that they were, could probably live quite well without a love of their life, but the tender-hearted females would be lost without it. I remember getting really quite cross about this. I thought the love that mattered, the love that endured, the love that one could not survive without was friend love. In all my early novels, the true love is that of friendship.

Thirty years on, I think that I was right. I was wrong about pretty much everything in my youth, except possibly my views on the Repeal of the Corn Laws. I had that arrogance of too much education, and could not yet tell the difference between book learning and life learning. But I think I got that part right. Apart, obviously, from having a red mare, the greatest joy in life is a true friend.

I smile as I write this. I think: why is she such a good friend? Why do I love her so? Let me count the ways. She is funny, and clever, and kind, and wise, and literal, and unexpected. She knows a lot about a lot of things, and she is very modest about it, hiding her light under a bushel. She’s stoical; she damn well gets on with it. I admire her, because she’s made one of the best and happiest and most interesting families I’ve ever seen. Her house is a happy house.

She’s an enthusiast. She does not make a three act opera of everything and she knows very well that not everything is about her. She is a good listener. She’s an incredible amount of fun to be around, but she also has something earthed in her, steady and rooted. She always makes me feel better than I am. She gets every single thing I say, so I never have to explain myself. She is generous and thoughtful. In thirty years, she has never bored me for a single second.

All that is true, and yet that is not all of it. She’s got that indefinable extra thing, that little sprinkle of stardust, that something special, that cannot go into easy words or blithe adjectives.

British people tend not to tell their friends how absolutely bloody marvellous they are. We Britons are brought up to read between the lines, rely entirely on understatement, take refuge in irony. It’s quite terrifyingly embarrassing to use a simple declarative sentence or make a direct expression of love. Even paying a compliment can feel alien and vulgar and must at once be followed by a joke. The real truth will generally only come out after copious amounts of strong liquor. (This may be why dear old Blighty is an island of drinkers.) But sometimes, I say to myself sternly, one must Say The Thing. If one has such a friend, it is worth more than rubies. From time to time, the thing must be marked. Respect is due. And gratitude, too.

 

Today’s pictures:

I love this one of the BC, not just because of the idiosyncratic rock and roll sunglasses, but because you can see me reflected in the left hand lens. There we are, together, at the click of a shutter:

With her girls:

And a little random collection of pictures from the last few days:

Return.

There was so much joy in the south, and so much love and laughter, and that glorious thing of a friendship which goes back almost thirty years, and children I have known since they were born. There is nothing quite like it. After a week with my best beloveds, I feel like a better human being.

But as always, I am delirious to be home. Even in the dreich and the mud and the murk, I sing songs as I mix the morning feeds and stuff the haynets and potter about in the shed. Outside, the red mare is grazing at liberty in the set-aside, where there is still something that might be called grass. This is our morning ritual. I let her out of the field to wander at liberty. She could gallop off to see the cows, but she doesn’t. She just mooches about in the open spaces and then comes and sticks her dear white face through the door of the shed, looking at me enquiringly, as if to say: ‘Are you doing that properly?’

Stan the Man is antic with delight. He has a lovely time always with the dog-sitter, but is gratifyingly pleased to see me. There is the tremendous lurcher thing he does, gathering all his energy into his athletic body and twisting and turning and leaping, so that he looks like an animated apostrophe. He is also very happy to be back to my mother’s house for breakfast, where he can see her and my stepfather and his special friend Edward the Terrier. They are a most unlikely couple and they adore each other. They dance around, Little and Large, playing special games of their own and panting at each other with love.

I whack back into work. I have returned to the second of the secret projects, neither of which are really secret any longer, but both of which started on spec. This is a fiction, and it’s a long time since I told a story. I have to remember the rhythms of it, how to keep the narrative taut, what to tell, what to leave out. I like this story and am pleased to go back to it. We are in serious Dead Darlings territory now, because there are 154,000 words, and that is far too many. Great cadres of them must die. I wield the bloody axe, ruthlessly. There are also additions, and decisions about the characters. This one must be put into the background, this one must be beefed up. Writing a novel takes ages because you have to live with your characters for a while to get to know them. Each morning now, I wake up and think: oh yes, that’s why that person did that. Slow revelations come and make sense of the thing. You can’t hurry it, although it drives me mad that you can’t. I’d love to be able to invent them on a dime, write a nice shopping list of traits, and be done with it. But they reveal themselves like onions, the layers peeling off to reveal the heart within, and the process can’t be rushed.

Dear old Scotland is drenched and melancholy, but I love her so much I don’t care. One day the sun will shine again. In the meantime, there is only sunshine in my heart.

 

Today’s pictures:

Far too gloomy to get the camera out, so here are a few snaps from my week away.

The Beloved Cousin sent these from her telephone – me with my sweet homebred friend Cocky Locky, and the three small cousins by a dam they built:

And a couple of the dear herd. I always stupidly took the camera out late in the day, as the gloaming was coming in, so that the light was gone and the quality of the pictures is not that good. But you can still see the sweetness:

Even though this one is terribly blurred, I rather love it:

Another blurry one, but worth it for the dearness:

Almost in focus:

Well, being pin-sharp is not everything:

Even though I have absolutely no technical knowledge, I do sometimes have a bit of secret pride when I manage to take a decent picture. But I rather love that these ones are not very good. It reminds me that the search for perfection is, along with high expectations, the absolute enemy of happiness. It reminds me that it is all right to be a bit scruffy and goofy and not the best at everything. My horrid competitive streak, which always wanted to be the top of the class, has to be smacked down every so often. So I think of putting these pictures up as a sort of salutary lesson. Good enough, my darlings; good enough.

The Sweetness of Family Life.

As always, I slightly forget the absolute enchantment of the family life with the Beloved Cousin. For enchantment it is. There has been a lot of cooking, picking the last vegetables from the garden, walking, admiring the apples still on the apple trees, watching the ravishing polo herd have their happy winter off, and playing with the ravishing black dogs.

The Youngest Cousin has turned into a mine of wisdom and information. She looks at me very seriously and says things like: ‘You know, being pretty is not important. Being kind is. And being happy.’

Grave pause.

I say: ‘How do you know that? Did someone tell you?’

Slightly reproachful look.

‘I do a lot of thinking, you know.’

She is six years old.

Then, gathering momentum – ‘Boasting is no good. Nobody likes a boaster.’

‘No,’ I say, chastened. I hope she is not referring to me. I think of all those blog posts about the wonders of the red mare and all the clever things she does. Has the Youngest Cousin been secretly reading the internet? And disapproving?

Then she moves swiftly on to information. ‘Do you know how many dinosaur names I know?’

‘No, I don’t.’

She kindly lists them.

‘Do you know that whales can hear from really far away? A thousand miles sometimes?’

‘I did not know that.’

She puts her head on one side. ‘They talk to each other,’ she says, slightly wistful.

‘What do they say?’ I ask.

‘Oh, I don’t know. ‘Hello, I’m lost’ I expect.’

‘I see,’ I say, trying to keep up.

She switches subjects like a London taxi turning on a sixpence.

‘Do you know how the Germans started the Second World War?’

I’m on slightly surer ground now. I perk up.

‘They invaded Poland?’ I hazard. ‘Or the Sudetenland?’

Dismissive frown. ‘I don’t know that country, but they were very, very cross with the English.’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I expect that’s what it was.’

Then I get a little break while she watches an episode of Scooby Doo.

Soon, she is back for more. She fixes me with her basilisk stare. ‘Do you know?’ she starts. I have begun to see there is a pattern here. ‘Do you know?’ is her newest and most regular conversational gambit. I sit up straight and concentrate.

‘Do you know,’ she says, ‘that King Henry put gunpowder in the holes so that when the Spain came THEY BLEW UP?’

I retire from the field, defeated. I have no memory of the Spain being blown up. Can she mean the Device Forts?

I know better than to ask.

 

Today’s pictures:

The focus and the light is a bit dodgy in some of these, but you can see the loveliness in them, even though I lack the technical skills to make them good photographs. One of my greatest joys is watching a herd at play. Most of the horses you see here were working incredibly hard through the summer, top athletes at the peak and crest of their game. Now, they just get to be muddy, furry, playful, rowdy equines, with not a bother on them. It’s one of the finest sights in the world. It is also, I reflect joyfully, the way a true horseman keeps his herd, natural and fleet and free.

Love and luck.

It’s been a very long and productive day. I went up to HorseBack UK. I am working on a new project for them at the moment and it means I go and see them quite a lot. Today I had the great joy of going up into the hills to see the horses who live there. (They are based at two different locations; one just west of me, and one about five miles to the north.)

The snow has come again. Down here in the valley it is miserable and wet and dirty and slushy. Red the Mare makes her most disapproving duchess face, and uses the filthy weather as an excuse to vamp for extra love. Which of course she gets. But up in the hills, the snow is glorious and white and thick and deep.

The horses were happy as grigs in their good rugs, and gathered round to say hello. There were some old friends and some I did not know so well, so I spent time introducing myself. By the end, I was surrounded by six or seven enquiring faces, all of them sniffing at me and mouthing the toggles on my coat and attempting to eat my fur hood. They were all so dear and gentle, and I was in absolute horse heaven.

Time still continues to gallop away from me, and I read myself stern lectures on self-improvement which do not amount to a hill of beans. One day, I think; one day I shall catch up with everything. In the meantime, I canter about like an unbroken colt, from unfinished thing to unfinished thing. I dream a little dream of The Organised People, and how lovely and calm and clear their lives must be. Still, I suppose it’s not the worst failing in the world. Even though my report card says Could Do Better, some things did get done.

Most of all, today made me keenly aware of luck and chance. The work I do for HorseBack and the people and equines there give me a satisfaction so profound I can’t really put it into words. It was through getting Red the Mare that I met them. And I only got her on the merest whim.

One of the Dear Readers asked a few days ago how it was that I came to have her. The story is so filled with near misses that I can hardly believe it came true.

For some reason, almost a year ago, I decided I would like to go back to horses. I think it had something to do with my dad dying. He was a horseman to his bones, and perhaps the idea was to keep some connection to him.

At that exact time, I was staying with the Beloved Cousin, whose husband makes polo ponies. I mentioned my whim, diffidently, to The Old Fella, and he said he happened to have a mare who was for sale. She was not good enough for high-goal, and she had been sold to China, which has recently rediscovered polo, but the man with the lorry had never pitched up, so she was still in the field.

The Old Fella offered to give me a look. I walked out of the back door to see him riding up on a chestnut mare, and I took one look at her white face and fell in love. ‘I’ll take her,’ I said. I rang up a transport firm and booked her to Scotland, and that was that.

So, if I had not been there at that particular time, and if the man with the lorry to China had arrived, and if she had been brilliant enough for high goal, and if and if – there would have been no Red. Even the thought of not having her in my life leaves me breathless. The fates indeed conspired; the stars aligned.

I worked with her for an hour this morning, and afterwards she stood quietly with her head on my chest. She likes to rest it there and close her eyes and let me gentle her sweet spots. No matter how distrait I am, no matter how fretful about my appalling time management, no matter how many things I have to do, that daily moment never fails to lift my heart and soothe my frayed nerves and bring me peace. It’s an idiot thing to say about a horse, but she is, without a doubt, the love of my life. I don’t need a valentine, because I have this glorious creature.

 

Today’s pictures:

The amazing HorseBack horses and one very special Shetland pony:

The herd, with their astonishing view. That is looking due south over the Dee valley:

It was too blizzardy when I got back to take the camera out, so here is a quick selection from the archive:

My golden girl with her dopey, donkey face on:

With her friend Autumn the Filly:

STANLEY HAS A STICK:

Hill: