I relive the Derby and Red the Mare imitates her more famous cousin. Or, a shaggy horse story for a Sunday afternoon.

It’s been a wild 24 hours. The Derby was one of the most dramatic I can remember. All the talk was of the mighty Dawn Approach, and my love for the great, unbeaten colt made me convince myself that he would get the trip and run away with the thing.

But as the time grew closer, my head said that the doubters had a point. It was that damn bottom line. So I looked at all the runners again, and had what they call a saver.

Oddly enough, it was not just Dawn Approach; pretty much all the runners had some kind of question mark over their heads. The track might not suit Libertarian’s way of running; the German form of Chopin was impossible to assess; Battle of Marengo had been workmanlike rather than thrilling last time out.

With my forensic betting hat on, I decided on Ruler of the World to get me out of trouble, for two reasons. He was the only horse in the race whom we knew stayed a mile and a half, and he had been very impressive at Chester. The twists and turns of Chester do not compare to the slopes and cambers of Epsom, but they do show whether a horse is well-balanced or not, and Ruler of the World had handled them with aplomb. Plus, he had Ryan Moore up, who is riding as beautifully and powerfully at the moment as any jockey I’ve seen.

And then came the great irony. Dawn Approach’s stand-out characteristic is his wonderful temperament. It was that which gave me hope he might stay, after all. His calm and dignity would conserve energy, and enable him to use every ounce of his power to get home. He was fine in the preliminaries, which test the thoroughbred to the limit. Seething crowds, barking loudspeakers, trumpet fanfares, men with television cameras; all this could be designed to freak out a flight animal. As if this were not enough, The Derby is unlike any other race meeting. The infield is free, and seventy thousand people gather there. The place is thronged with charabancs and monstrous funfair rides. Earlier in the day, Richard Hughes did well to keep Thunder Strike running straight when he spooked at some buses in the final furlong.

By the time Dawn Approach got to the start, he was sweating and on his toes, most unlike himself. As the stalls clattered open, he finally boiled over. He jumped and strained and fought for his head. The funereal pace gave poor Kevin Manning no chance to settle him. Rhythm wins races, and the great horse never came anywhere near a rhythm. He was less galloping than leaping.

He was still pulling at Tattenham Corner, when Manning had to let him go. ‘Oh, this is bad,’ said Simon Holt. For an impossible, hopeful moment, the colt hit the front and at last found his stride. But it was too late; the race was gone. The field overwhelmed him and he faded tamely away; all Jim Bolger’s Derby dreams and a million betting slips fluttering into the sunny air.

And Ruler of the World, my other fella? He put on an astonishing burst of late race speed which propelled him to the front two out, and kept on, straight and true, to the line.

For a while, I was too sad to appreciate the win. After all the anticipation, it was truly melancholy to watch a fine colt throw a race away like that. But later, I ran the replay and could finally thrill to a majestic performance. Ruler of the World doesn’t look much. He’s quite lightly furnished, a washy chestnut, with a narrow head. He does not have the powerful frame of Libertarian or the lovely outlook of Chopin; he does not have that preening presence which some champions carry. But he has talent, and he is bred in the purple, and he has an indomitable racing heart, and that was what got him there.

The other lovely thing is that Libertarian ran on like a train to snatch second, a triumph for the north, which has not sent out a Derby winner since the mighty Dante in 1945.

Even lovelier than all of it was that dear old St Nicholas Abbey, one of my favourite horses in training, absolutely cruised home in the Coronation Cup, making history in the process. He’s the first colt to win it three years in a row, a soaring achievement. He didn’t need shouting, but I roared him on all the same.

This morning, inspired by all that power and speed, I took Red the Mare for a long Sunday ride. We went out into the west meadow, Stanley loping by our side. There were fleet deer running out of the woods and the sun was shining and my mare was perfect. She is generally uncertain about going out on her own, so I was especially delighted by her sang-froid.

But as we came back towards the paddock, Autumn the Filly was getting a bad attack of separation anxiety. Her good leader had left her, and she was shouting and racing up and down the fenceline, almost in panic. We will have to work on this, I thought, before putting my full mind on Red, who was suddenly imitating her more famous cousin of yesterday.

All her high thoroughbred blood raced through her, and she did the thing she  does when fired up, which is to grow about a hand instantly, as if someone has blown her up with a bicycle pump. Her head went up in the air, and she switched into full emergency mode. She takes her job as lead mare very seriously, and one of her girls was in trouble.

Autumn continued to gallop back and forth like a barrel racer, Myfanwy trundling behind her like a little grey shadow. All Red wanted to do was gallop with them. It was the first time since I’ve been riding her in the rope halter that her blood was really up, and it was a fascinating moment. If she had decided to go, she could have. I am a ten stone human; she is a half ton horse. There’s no contest.

I sat deep and held her. She jumped and snorted and cavorted. I laughed and joshed her. ‘Come on, old lady,’ I said. ‘They are fine.’ I turned her in a couple of circles to get her mind back on me and her feet moving. If in doubt, always move the feet. And then she took a decision. She was going to listen to me, not the flight voices roaring in her ears.

And on we went. She was still pretty lit up and I had to concentrate and be strong and easy in the saddle. But there we were, my ex-racing girl and me, with a bunch of stimulus thrown at us, and it had worked out perfectly fine. I laughed in delight. I even sang her a little song. She likes a song.

There was a rather touching postscript to this story. When I took her back to the paddock, Red and Autumn touched noses and breathed at each other in delight and relief. As I took the halter off and let Red go, I was convinced she and the filly would roar off together, doing their Spanish Riding School of Vienna schtick. But instead, they gathered on either side of me, lowering their heads for love.

So the three of us stood there for a while, in the gentle Sunday sunshine, just happy to be together. It was one of my small things. And at the same time, it was a huge thing. I felt very vivid and very alive and very present in the world. The gifts that horse gives me are worth more than rubies.

 

 

Today would have been my Dad’s birthday. I’ve shown you this picture before, but it’s one of my favourites and I show it to you again. I don’t know if riding is heritable, but my father had a thing when he was in the saddle, a sort of gritted teeth determination, and I think of that quite a lot when I am on my mare. He was not the most stylish jockey in the world, but my mother always says that horses just ran for him. That’s a gift; you can’t teach it.

I miss him a lot.

Derby Day; or, my racing heart

It is Derby Day.

This is the day that I go down to my quiet field, ringed by Scottish hills and deep woods, and tell my mare of the great moment in 1970 that her grandfather won the storied race.

This is, of course, absurd, and not just because she does not speak English and the name Nijinsky means nothing to her. He was a prolific sire; there are hundreds, possibly thousands of his descendants running round green fields and emerald racetracks.

And yet, it is a daily source of idiot pride to me. It is one of the things that makes me singingly happy. On dark evenings when my spirits fall, I lift them again by going back through her pedigree, finding the mighty names of Hyperion, Gainsborough, St Simon, Mahmoud, Eclipse, and all three of the foundation sires.

Pedigree is what everyone is talking about today. The breeding of racehorses is a science and an art. It is also a lottery. My darling Red was the slowest horse in England, despite her illustrious bloodlines.

The question now is how will that lottery shake out for Dawn Approach. His sire, New Approach, won the Derby himself. New Approach’s daughter, Talent, won The Oaks yesterday. There are no stamina worries there. But it is the bottom line that people often say counts for more, and although there are stayers further back in his dam’s pedigree, Dawn Approach’s mother never raced over further than a mile, and ran mostly at shorter distances.

This is what makes today most extraordinarily exciting. Dawn Approach is a beautiful, well-made, athletic horse with a thrilling degree of natural talent. He also has the advantage of a glorious temperament, taking all the hoopla and razzmatazz of big race days with a gentlemanly calm. Nijinsky, by contrast, used to get wired to the moon. My mother still remembers watching him getting hotter and hotter in the paddock, even after forty years. It was only the genius and patience of Vincent O’Brien that made him into the racehorse he was.

I think of Nijinsky today too because people forget that many serious pundits said he would not stay. He too had questions over his bloodlines, but Lester Piggott and Vincent O’Brien had faith, and he repaid it in spades. He not only won the Derby but completed the Triple Crown when he trounced them in the St Leger, winning on the bridle with Lester cheekily easing him up at the line.

If he stays, he wins, is the line on Dawn Approach. His good temperament will help to conserve energy; his soaring talent will see him through. I’d love to see him make monkeys of them all, with his good heart and his big white face, but there is a possibility he will just pack up two furlongs out, and the glittering dreams will smash to the ground.

The truth is, nobody knows. We shall not be certain of anything until about four minutes past four this afternoon, when the cards are played and the hand revealed. Because of this uncertainty, it is one of the most exciting Derby days I can remember. We have an unbeaten colt, of visceral speed, incredible ability, high class, in the hands of a master trainer. And we have the hovering question mark, dancing over his lovely head.

As I write this, my fingers are trembling faintly. My heart is beating in my chest. There are still three hours to go and I can hardly sit still. I always ask myself why, on these great days. It’s just a race, it’s just a horse; what can it matter?

It is love, for me. It is an antic, vivid, visceral love. I love these racing horses because they are so beautiful, and brave, and bold. So much is asked of them, and so much is given.

But thinking now, I wonder if it is something even more profound than that. Despite Dawn Approach’s lovely, easy temperament, there is something of the wild still in these fast thoroughbreds. They are different from other horses in their pure breeding for the perfect combination of strength and velocity. Any of them, running from the gaff tracks to the famous courses, must go back through eight straight generations even to take part.

I think there is something in that purity, which produces the brilliance and the will to win, which touches an untamed part of the human self. Racehorses are not quite domesticated in the way that riding horses are. It is fanciful, but I think they still hear their ancestral voices, calling down the generations. There is something untrammelled and uncontained about them, which touches the depths of my own human heart.

In life, especially in middle age, I must learn to be sensible and practical and reasonable. (I do not always succeed.) I must live in the civilised world and play by the good rules of civilised society. Watching a great thoroughbred, at full stretch, with all that mighty, wild brilliance, that soaring spirit, that fierce determination, that gleaming loveliness, I feel released from my ordinary, workaday self. I too am untrammelled, taken back to the elemental, wild parts of my sometimes confined spirit. In some odd way, these brilliant creatures set me free.

I love them because they are beautiful, and I love them because they are true. They are truth and beauty; that is all I know and all I need to know.

And I hope that Dawn Approach does defy the doubters. I hope he does stay. I hope he swoops round the impossible camber of Tattenham Corner and sets the crowd on a roar. I hope his sun also rises.

 

Only time for two pictures today. I wanted to show you Red at her most thoroughbred and aristocratic. You can see her here after a damn good gallop round the field, her veins up, her grand blood coursing through her. I had to go back to last year for these, because now she is so relaxed that she rarely breaks out of an amble, and spends most of her time looking more like a dozy old donkey than a descendant of Derby winners:

Have a great day, my darlings. Win or lose, I think it will truly be a race to remember.

Sunday Jubilee

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

It was a really happy day.

Very early, I went up to see the mare. She raised her head, whinnied, and cantered from the farthest corner of the field, swirled to a halt in front of me, raising a dramatic cloud of dust, ducked her head, and whickered. She has never done that before. She usually waits, regally, as if she is the Queen herself, for me to come to her. I felt as if she had given me a huge present, and showered her with love and carrots, both of which she seemed to find eminently acceptable.

I did two thousand words.

Then I thought, bugger it, I’m supposed to be working all afternoon, but the Diamond Jubilee does not come along every day, so I went up to my mother and the Lovely Stepfather, and we watched some of the dear old BBC coverage. I have been so cut off from the world in my deadline fever, that the idea of a royal regatta existed only very faintly on the far edge of my consciousness. But oh, oh the boats. The whole Thames was filled with them, everything from dour old working Yorkshire coal boats (the captain of that was my favourite; ‘Here’s one for the North,’ he said, grinning all over his face) to Edwardian pleasure cruisers. There were proper Naval vessels and narrow boats and lovely Victorian rowing skiffs. There were Olympic rowers and, perhaps the thing that amazed me most of all, Venetian gondoliers.

‘Someone went and got VENETIANS,’ I yelled at my mother.

The Queen looked awfully happy, and the banks were lined with Ordinary Decent Britons, yelling and whooping and giving three cheers.

On paper, Republicanism makes perfect philosophical sense; the hereditary principle is, on the face of it, absurd. But on a day like today, it just feels a little bit snobbish and curmudgeonly. There were crowds of people, having a perfectly lovely time, in the gloomy summer weather, and I defy anyone to shake a reproving finger at that.

At four, vaguely aware that there was something going on on our village green (a very rare thing in Scotland; it was laid out on an English model by some old laird who had been brought up in the south) I wandered down with the Pigeon. And there was the village, dancing. They were doing a mass strip the willow, to much hilarity. Then there was three cheers for Her Majesty, and a rendition of God Save the Queen. It was oddly touching. Balmoral is not away, and half our shops have By Royal Appointment signs above their doors; here on Deeside the Royal Family feel like locals.

I loved the whole thing. The older I get, the more I appreciate a bit of good old British pomp. I even rather love the fact that, in London, it was raining. Sunshine would be far too vulgar and faintly European. We are bred to bad weather. On the radio, some onlookers were being interviewed. ‘Is the weather dampening your spirits?’ asked the presenter. ‘Oh, no,’ they said, and with marvellous non-sequitur, ‘You see, we are from Norfolk.’

Yesterday was my father’s birthday. It was the Derby. He adored the Derby. He always went, looking very smart in his shiny black top hat. I was fired with the excitement of the great race, and it did turn out to be a great race, where a new champion was born, and a nineteen-year-old Irish boy called Joseph O’Conner made history, riding his father’s horse Camelot to victory. No father and son combination has ever won the Derby in its 230 year history. I shouted my head off, and missed my own father so much I could hardly breathe.

In the morning, rather madly, I had told the mare the story of how her famous grandfather won the Derby. She listened politely. I wished, suddenly, violently, that my dad could have been there to see her, in all her aristocratic beauty, with her outrageous bloodlines. I cried for him, astonished at how acute and fresh the sorrow still can be, over a year after his death.

So, all human life has been here, in the last 36 hours. The memory of my dad, the sweetness of the living family, the joy of my horse, the best racing in the world, every kind of boat on the dirty old Thames, the village out in its pomp, the celebration of our own dear Queen. And I did over four thousand words, and am closing in on the end of the book. Not bad, really.

 

Today’s pictures.

The village green celebrating the Jubilee:

 

My lovely Red, bowing her beautiful head:

The Pigeon in her special Jubilee lead:

She really does look rather queenly herself.

The hill, rather blurry today:

What I especially liked about the celebration today is that it was all so tremendously British. I’m not sure exactly why, and I’m not sure exactly why that gives me pleasure, but it does.

It was the best of British, and I wave my own little metaphorical flag.