Lester’s boots. Or, love and grief.

This morning, at 7.30, my mother died.

She has been ill for a long time. I have not written about it, for two reasons. First of all, I did not want to be a bore. (I am British. Being a bore is almost my greatest fear, apart from going mad in the night and waking up in the belief that I am Queen Marie of Roumania.) Second of all, until the final days when she was too weak to look at the internet, she used to read this blog. It cheered her up. She liked hearing about the red mare and seeing the pictures. I did not want her to tune in and find me wailing about her horrid pain.

She was in horrid pain, mostly from osteoporosis, which is an absolute bastard. Eat your calcium, I want to shout at everyone. Don’t go on stupid diets; get those bones lovely and strong.

She bore it with great stoicism, until, in the end, it was too much for her, and she went gentle into that good night. It was very peaceful, and she held my stepfather’s hand as she slipped away.

I don’t have any regrets, because I have made her breakfast every morning for the last few years, and took in her Racing Post each Saturday, and talked of Golden Horn and Treve and all the horses she loved. Sometimes, after a great race, she would ring me up and say: ‘Are you crying?’ And I would say: ‘Weeping like a mad woman.’

I’m so glad she saw Frankel, whom she adored, and Kauto Star – ‘he has the look of eagles, just like Arkle’ – and Quevega and Annie Power, her two favourite mares. ‘Oh, Annie,’ she would say, with a dying fall, as the mighty athlete powered to another soaring victory. She loved Ruby Walsh and AP and Sir Henry Cecil, whom she knew from the old days in Newmarket. ‘Henry did love his roses.’

And I do have regrets, because however much you have done, and however much has been said – ‘I love you,’ I said yesterday, as I went out of the door to see to my own mares – there is always the wish for one more question, one more story, one more checking of the facts. She was my last archivist, and now she is gone. I wanted to ask her again about the time she saw Mill Reef, and how she and Dad went to Nijinsky’s Arc (Dad lost a fortune), and what it was really like when Arkle won the Gold Cup.

Most of all, I wanted to hear for one last time the story of Lester’s Boots.

This is a story that has gone into family folklore, but I can’t tell how much has been embroidered over the years. When my mother and father were young, they were very beautiful and rather glamorous, and, on the racecourse, they met all kinds of fascinating people. Just after Lawrence of Arabia came out, they went to Newbury with Peter O’Toole. (The bit I can’t remember is how or why. What were they doing with Lawrence?) Drinks were taken. As they went to the car park, they lost O’Toole, and turned round to find him weaving towards them, a look of devilment in his eye and a suspicious lump under his coat.

As they drove away, he sat up in the back seat, fumbled under his coat, and produced a pair of riding boots. ‘Lester’s boots!!!’ he proclaimed in triumph. He had liberated them from the weighing room, a crazy prize from the champion jockey.

My father was a very naughty man indeed and never met a rule he did not break, but he had a great respect for the sanctity of the weighing room, and was horrified. My mother instructed him to get up early the next morning, and drive back to Newbury, and return the boots.

Lester’s phlegmatic valet was unmoved. Apparently they were the oldest pair of boots and almost ready for retirement. Dad’s mad dash had been almost for nothing.

Mum used to laugh and laugh when she told this story. I don’t know why, of all the stories, this is the one I cherish most. I kept meaning to ask her to tell it again, so I could get all the details right, but I never did. I’m sad about that.

I’m sad that she did not meet Scout, my dear new mare, who stood by my side for ten minutes this morning, as if knowing I needed comfort. I had a wild plan to get the bed wheeled out to the front door with Mum in it, so I could bring the kind mare up the steps to say hello. Too late for that now.

I am making tomato soup for my dear, dear stepfather, because it is his favourite. ‘I must keep your strength up,’ I say, staunchly. We had breakfast together this morning, the house unbearably quiet as my mother’s spirit has gone from it. ‘It is so strange,’ we said to each other, over and over again. I had no idea how much she filled that house until she left it. She was still there, in the bedroom, but she was gone, and the absence was shocking.

I rang the Beloved Cousin first, because she is always my first call, and she is the wisest person I know. We were together for her parents’ deaths, and it was to her house I drove, in a lovely English spring, after my father’s funeral.

I spoke to my good sister, who is on her way north. We did not need to say much. We have been through this before. We know it all.

I talked to my cherished friend, The World Traveller, who said: ‘You will come here when you need to?’ I said: ‘Yes, because the only thing that makes death bearable is love.’ Then I made some mordant joke and we both laughed, and I said: ‘There it is. I’ve made my first death joke.’ (Did I mention that I am British? There must always be laughter and irony to go along with the tears. It’s our great cultural imperative.)

The Landlord called, to say that he would go and collect my sister from the airport. ‘You are so damn clever,’ I said. ‘That is what I need just now. Practical help.’ The practical is very important in grief, because one is all at sixes and sevens, and it’s hard enough to tie one’s shoelaces, let alone drive a motor car. That was a fine act of love, I thought. He is a proper human.

I went to the shop to get tomatoes for the soup. There was a new girl at the till, very friendly and jolly. ‘How are you today?’ she said.

I gave the standard answer. ‘Not too bad, thank you.’

In my head, I shouted: my mum died.

We talked about the weather, because that is what we do.

‘I hope you have a good day,’ she said, with a blinding smile.

MY MUM DIED, the voice in my head bawled.

I nodded quietly. ‘I shall,’ I said.

It poured with rain this morning. Now the sun is coming out, thick and yellow and ancient.

My mother was brave and beautiful. She had some sad times in her life, more than I would wish, but she found great joy in the last years with the husband she loved so much, and who adored her. She went the way she wanted to, quietly, and with dignity, at home. She dreaded the hospital and the tubes and the machines. We dreaded that for her. In the end, she took it into her own hands. She did this thing, in the way she wanted. It was an act of will. She had had enough, and so she went. She is at rest.

Why do I write this now? The imperative to get to the keyboard and type was mighty. Give sorrow words, Shakespeare said. Words are my love and my solace; words, I sometimes think, are all I have.

I wanted to mark it; I wanted to pay respect. I wanted also, in a very plain and authentic way, to share it. I know that, out there in the long prairies of the internet, there are many, many people who know this grief, who will nod their heads, and say: ‘Yes, yes, I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.’ (Actually, not that many people will say exactly that, but I always come back to TS, in the end.) What I mean is there is a communion in sorrow. We all have human hearts, and those human hearts creak and break and crack. And we all put them back together, with sellotape and binder twine and hope, and keep buggering on.

I miss my mum. I am passionately, profoundly glad that she is out of that wracking pain. But I miss her. Love is love.

 

This is my favourite picture of my mother, at the races, with my sister and the younger of my two brothers. Wasn’t she fine?

This is why.

My work at HorseBack is almost always done in a hurry. I dash up, canter about taking pictures, make some bad jokes, shout with laughter, wave and grin at everyone, yell ‘GOOD WORK’ a lot, give my favourite horses a good rub on the neck, make some more bad jokes, and gallop away again, in a rush to get back to my desk and knuckle down to my day job.

Today, there was such a great group, and some very welcome visitors, and people I really wanted to talk to, so I thought bugger it, the day job can wait. As I was chatting to one veteran, and admiring Red, my favourite HorseBack mare, I suddenly found one of the great stories being told.

I learnt, early on, to keep very, very still when I am privileged with this kind of information. I’ve heard stories which were so extreme that I could not write them. I’ve been taken to the limits of human endurance, and, sometimes, when the sights and sounds and horrors are unrolled before me, I have a visceral reaction, as if all the atoms in my body are so outraged that they must rearrange themselves. It’s like a kind of existential pins and needles.

I stand back, taking the pressure off, just as I would with a horse, listen hard, and keep my face utterly straight. I do not exclaim or interrupt. I do not let my eyebrows shoot up into my hairline or allow my mouth to fall open. Most importantly of all, I do not do the pity face. These men and women do not want pity. I’m not even sure they want empathy. I think, although nobody has said this in so many words, that they need a witness. Sometimes, I am lucky enough to be chosen as that witness.

In conversation, these veterans are, variously: courageous, wise, angry, philosophical, fatalistic, stoical, and wounded. They are always funny, with the gallows humour that runs through the forces like a black seam of obsidian. They are searingly honest, utterly straightforward, and almost painfully authentic. Many of them have seen things which no human eye should have to see.

Today’s story started off bad, got worse, grew ridiculously awful, and went back to bad.

I stood still and listened. I employed a bit of heavy irony. (Irony is much, much better than sympathy.) I asked a couple of questions. I am very sparing with my questions, as I don’t want to be intrusive. I did not cry, although that would have been a correct reaction. I did what they do. I laughed. I hoped there was human companionship in that laugh.

Then, the gentleman smiled, and looked at his horse. The mare was dozing gently behind him, her head by his shoulder. She knows nothing of Afghan or Iraq or Bosnia, where he had been. She knows nothing of the roaring torrents of post-traumatic stress, or what too much hot war does to the human brain. She knows only this man in front of her, as he is in that moment. She likes him. They have forged a fast and deep bond. This does not always happen, but, in an amazing number of cases, it does.

The veteran gentled her and tenderly pulled her forelock. She blinked at him, at peace in her world. The little atoms in my body moved and shifted. ‘She does not judge me,’ said the veteran.

Some people don’t get it about horses. They regard with bemusement my love and admiration for the gentle, brave, beautiful creatures. Perhaps they ask themselves why anyone should be filled with admiration for a half-ton flight animal. I can talk until my ears fall off about honesty, and courage, and generosity, and heart, and it may mean nothing.

This, this is why. That moment: that wounded human, that fine mare.
 
Today’s pictures:

‘We are a partnership,’ said the veteran. Yes, they are.



My own fine partner:



I did say one thing, as I was listening to that story. When the gentleman got to the part about the horse, and how she made him feel, I burst out, because I could not help myself: ‘They do bring out your best self. They require your best self.’ He nodded, as if this was perfectly obvious. I have too many flaws to count, but when I am with my red mare I hear the wings of my better angels flapping.

An awful lot of love.

I woke to blinding sunshine and ridiculously loud birdsong, as if the local avians were having some kind of arcane competition. I arrived at the field this morning to find two horses and a human fast asleep. It was one of the all-time great sights.

My little great-niece came for a ride. The red mare was, as she always is, utterly enchanting when faced with a small child. It is as if she knows, deep in her bones, that absolute gentleness is required.

We played around with the mare on the ground, and she showed off her paces in delightful fashion. Then the little jockey got up. She was suddenly a tiny bit doubtful, as it was the first time she had been on the mare, but her mother and I delicately encouraged, and she lifted her chin and screwed her courage to the sticking place and got into the plate.

‘Just sit there for a bit and feel the mare under you,’ I said, smiling up at the little face, which had a mixture of joy and uncertainty in it. ‘Feel the peace coming off her. That’s it. Now breathe, big deep breaths in and out.’

She thought this game was very funny, so we did silly breathing for a while. The red mare went to sleep. ‘Now,’ I said. ‘Big smile. And wave your arms in the air.’

The arms went up, into the blue Scottish sky. The mare stood like a statue, still dozing. ‘Now give her a good old rub on the neck to say well done,’ I said.

By this time, as the small hand ran up and down the great chestnut neck, there was no need to instruct the smile. It was beaming out into the day, as bright as the sun.

We walked, very very slowly. The good mare, understanding that she had precious cargo, perhaps sensing that her young passenger was not brimful of cavalier spirit but feeling her way, put each foot on the ground with as much fine delicacy as if she were treading on bone china.

‘Feel her moving under you,’ I said. ‘And just go with her. Don’t forget to breathe.’

And so we did a little walk, and then we did some more standing, and the smile stayed steadily in place, without wavering.

‘And say thank you,’ I said, laughing.

So the little person thanked the big thoroughbred, and everyone was smiling, and the swifts flew low over our heads, and Stanley the Dog larked about by the treeline, looking for pheasants, and everything was merry as a marriage bell.

I was very impressed, and said so. Some children leap up onto that mare as if she were a Shetland pony, with no fear. Some of them want to go off on their own, and I take my hand from the reins, and, even though staying close and keeping a strict weather eye, let them ride by themselves. Some of them are so excited that they would probably kick off into the horizon if I would let them.

This small person had adored the idea, but was daunted by the reality. She loves the mare, and knows her quite well, but when it came to it, that big athletic body did suddenly seem quite a climb. She had to grit her teeth a little, and face her doubts, and she did, in fine style. Her mother and I were quite prepared to say: never mind, another day. But I’m so glad she did get on, because facing your fears is the greatest triumph of all, and that tiny girl could teach a lot of burly grown-ups a good life lesson.

I loved the mare very much for being so tender with her, and felt profoundly touched to know that I can trust this horse with one of the best of the Best Beloveds.

Then I drove the long way round to buy some delicious meadow chaff for my good girl, because it’s the least she deserves, and looked at the blue hills basking in the sunshine, and wrote half a book in my head, mapping out each scene as if I were watching a film, and felt lucky. The Beloved Cousin rang up, and I pulled over and had a long and fond conversation, and then went home and did my work and reflected that it was hard to think of a day filled with more love.

I think sometimes about the people I know who have had great worldly success, and earned money, and got their existential passports rubber-stamped. I admire them vastly and don’t know how they do it. I could no more build a business up from scratch or transform an ailing company or star in a film than fly over the moon. My successes and rewards are tiny, private, and make no headlines. They bring in no great salary or tremendous bonus. But they are worth more than diamonds to me.

A girl on a horse, the smiles of my family, the voice of my dear friend on the telephone, the rolling Scottish hills – these are my glittering prizes. It’s more cheesy than cheese on toast with extra cheese, but there it is: the truest fact I know.

‘Love the small things,’ the Cousin and I shouted at each other, laughter in our voices, mostly at ourselves, at our own follies and idiosyncrasies. But the older I get, the more I think it is the secret of life, if there is a secret. Take joy in the very, very small and the big things will take care of themselves. That’s my damn theory, and I’m sticking to it.

 

Today’s pictures:

Two drowsing horses, one drowsing human:

We were concentrating so hard on the riding that there was no time for pictures, but here is the small great-niece and her mother before the Great Ride. You can see the Paint in the background, contemplating where she should actually get up or not. (The answer was: not.)

The long way round to buy the meadow chaff. Not a bad drive to the shops:

I’m not sure why everything was quite so blue today. The light was doing something fascinating, as if it were throwing a fine azure veil over the sleeping land:

After everyone woke up, the Paint and her human went out for a ride, closely overseen by the red mare. She does not like her charge to go anywhere without a permission slip:

Every day I think I could not love this mare more, and every day I do. It’s as if she breaks all the laws of physics and human emotion and neurobiology and I don’t know what all. She is a sort of miracle:

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:

In which I want to be horrid and decide to be nice.

I was going to do something perfectly horrid today.

Yesterday, two things occurred to upset me. Both were very small, hardly visible to the naked eye, but they left me wounded and unsettled. As I swung into my usual tired old technique of calling in the Perspective Police and talking myself down off the ceiling, I hit on the solution. I would use words. Apart from love and trees, words are my solution to everything. Write it down, write it down, sing the voices in my head.

So, I wrote it down.

It was quite late at night, and I wrote it as a blog. I did not name the people involved, and I believed I was bending over backwards to be fair and not to impute beastly motives where there were none.

In fact, I had to admit to myself this morning, I was indulging in a perfect festival of passive aggression. I was still so sore as I wrote that I was doing that ghastly thing of seeming reasonable, when, in fact, underneath, the six-year-old in me was wailing: BLOODY PEOPLE, WHY CAN’T YOU JUST SAY SOMETHING NICE?????

Even as I faced the twisted motives behind my apparently rational post, I raced around like a rat in a trap, trying to work out a way of not being passive aggressive, but still telling you the story of what had happened.

But here is the thing. Even if I worked out a way of taking the heat out of it, keeping it as vague and anonymous as possible, putting on my rational, disinterested hat, I was still flailing about, trying to punish because I had been hurt. I was not disinterested; I had skin in the game, and that skin was singed.

Fuck it, I thought. Be a grown-up. Be a decent human being. Adult humans get hurt all the time, take it on the chin, refuse to turn the thing into a three act opera, and, most of all, do not feel the need to tell everyone on the internet.

Adult humans also make choices.

I am not nearly as nice as I think I am. I really would like to be nice, an adjective I do not disdain but crave. I am capable of niceness, but I can think some unbelievably crushing and uncharitable and mean thoughts. I like to think that I don’t judge or harbour prejudices or indulge in ad hominem attacks, but when my skin is thin I can bitch someone up to beat the band.

However, in a slightly hello clouds, hello sky way, I do aspire to niceness. I really admire nice people, because I think it’s a fairly hard state to maintain in a very shouty world.

Today, I had a proper choice. I could be a passive aggressive horror show, OR I could be nice. I chose niceness.

I spent four hours doing things which were not for me. Several people have asked me for photographs of the last few days at HorseBack. My usual response is: yes, yes, of course, just let me find a moment, give me a few days, it’s all a bit chaotic, I’ll get back to you. Then, I don’t get back, because I’m sitting at my desk panicking about the two absurd books I am writing and being entirely unable to make the time to do anything else.

Today, I made the time. The whole process takes ages, because of course I can’t just whack a few snaps into a Dropbox album and send them off, but have to edit and re-edit, choose all the best ones, then change my mind and choose other ones, make manic decisions about whether I should saturate the colour or put them into black and white, crop and re-crop and I don’t know what. I’m not a good enough photographer to take a picture and let it be; it must be doctored. These were lovely people, and I wanted them to have photographs worth of them.

I started at three-thirty this afternoon, and I’ve only just finished. There are ninety-nine pictures which are now fit for public consumption.

I’m still a bit bruised from yesterday, and I’m taut as a violin string from a day of non-stop work. I did not even ride the mare this morning, but merely gave her love and food and went back to my book. (The agent is not yet quite happy, so I am still polishing and rubbing and shining, like an out-of-control fifties housewife who has lost her valium.) But I’m really, really pleased that I decided on a constructive act instead of a destructive one.

God, I wanted to be horrid. I was so cross I wanted to tear the buggery house down. But I built a little shack instead. I did the photograph albums, and they are downloading now and will soon wing their way off to their recipients. I don’t always manage it, but however wet and weedy it sounds, today, I chose niceness.

 

Today’s pictures:

Here are some of the photographs I sent out into the ether:

A lot of these pictures were for Robert Gonzales and his lovely wife Patricia. Robert, as the Dear Readers will know, is the great horseman who was visiting us from California. I learnt more about horses in three weeks of watching him than I could put into words, and I know a lot about words.

He is not only a fine horseman, he is a great gentleman too. He would not write something beastly mean on the internet, under the guise of being rational and reasonable. I should think of his example.

In the last picture, he is waiting for the horse to soften. He can do this for half an hour at a time, as long as it takes. ‘Wait for the softness,’ he says. ‘Look for the softness. Let them find the softness.’

I can learn from that too. It’s not just for the horses. It’s for the poor old humans too. Next time I get bent out of shape, I’m going to wait. For the softness.

 

Oh, and PS. To the Dear Reader who said nobody needed my permission, you are quite right. I phrased it poorly, and have been filled with angst that I sounded like some ghastly, wafty, de haut en bas creature. What I should have said is that I often need permission. When a best beloved admits to faults or doubts or muddles or confusions, I find this enables me to confess my own inadequacies without terror. I need a permit; I need my passport stamped.

I’m working on this. One day I shall cross the border without passport control. I’ll hang out more damn flags on that glorious day.

In the meantime, I’m sorry for the confusion. It’s the kind of mistake that fills me with rue.