LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

I took Billy on the lead, towing him behind me while Lara, my daughter, rode her own bike. We soon got into the routine of cycling the three miles to Lara’s school, although the first time we did this we were both nervous that Billy was going to end up under the wheels either of the bike or of a car, bus or lorry. But he got used to it and soon enough he was running alongside us, as we pedalled merrily past the morning commuters.

      The weather throughout most of that winter was cold and crisp. I wore a beautiful brown tweed coat from Cordings of Piccadilly, more at home at a local point-to-point than Chelsea. Wrapped up in a puffa jacket and scarf, Lara would get dreadfully embarrassed because most parents either drove their children to school or sent nannies to escort them. After a few weeks, though, in a funny way she came round to enjoying the eccentricity of it all. Billy, on the other hand, loved it from day one. Cycling down long, tree-lined carriageways, over Chelsea Bridge, we’d stop to cross the main roads, waiting for articulated lorries to pass in a blast of diesel fumes. We took these opportunities to train Billy to sit and wait and for the lights to change before we get back on our bikes again. On the final leg of the journey we turned down Ebury Street and skirted Belgravia with people waving at us, cheering us as we arrived at the school gates. I would then chain Lara’s bike to the railings outside the school until repeating the exercise later on in the day at 3.45, when I’d go to collect her.

      From school I might go to the bank, Billy still in tow, or the butcher’s, before returning home to stew some more lentils. Each time I cycled back on my own through the park I would pretend that it was a horse beneath me and not a bicycle and I would pedal furiously, overtaking Billy as he barked at me, feeling the wind in my face and knowing that every day I did this my thigh muscles would get stronger.

      Working from home with Rose meant that we would meet for coffee after the school cycle ride and lunch together at 1 p.m. when we would routinely assess my diet and the exercise I was going to do. We quickly realized that the cycling alone was not enough, and so, twice a week, from the beginning of February, I took myself off to the Chelsea swimming baths just off the King’s Road and put myself through twenty lengths of really hard physical swimming, resisting the urge to resort to doggy paddle rather than the really good heart-pumping stuff of front crawl and breaststroke.

      One of the many benefits of the new regime is that I found mundane weekly chores much more enticing. Going off to the shops became a welcome distraction much more easily accomplished on a bicycle than in a car. As a result, as the new regime took hold I constantly found excuses to leave the house to go for a ride on my bike. I worked out that the long driveway running west to east in Battersea Park was roughly a mile long, so each time I left the house, no matter where I was going, I would always put in a lap of the track before returning home. I would step high on the pedals and start to push, pump and tug the handlebars as if they were reins. I would try to get the bike to go flat out and kept imagining, as on those journeys back from school, that below me was not tubular steel but a real, live, galloping beast of a horse, even though I had no idea when I would be getting anyway near one.

      It was only a few weeks before I was sleeping more deeply, exhausted, but exhilarated, by the exercise. From about the second week of the diet I would wake every morning quite literally feeling things – toxins, perhaps – being expunged from my body. Although I already felt leaner – even if the scales did not say as much at that stage – almost the day I started the diet spots began to appear on my face as though twenty years of three-hour lunches and fine wine was seeping out of my body. It was as though my body was celebrating the change, enjoying the respite I was affording it and was preparing itself for the transformation that I was undergoing. Very soon after I started the regime, I ceased to have the urge to eat as I once had done, to drink or to smoke. It was as though the passion I had for all these pleasures had been transferred in one fell swoop to indulging none of them as I set about straightening myself out and getting fit.

      By the end of the first month I had given up smoking altogether. Even at Christmas, I had been devouring thirty cigarettes a day with religious devotion even though I was not starting until after three in the afternoon. Like any good addict, I had quit on numerous occasions in the past and found it easy, but this time it would be different, I promised myself. This time I would quit for good, another positive side-effect of going in pursuit of this dream. The only problem, I knew, was that when I stopped smoking I would have to look for some other distraction. If I could channel that dedication into another kind of obsession, then I would easily be fit for a race day in September.

      Chapter Two

      I was six years old, completely enamoured and unable to move for the sight of it. I was walking with my mother through a mottled concrete yard near Mill Hill, an affluent suburb of north London. The treacly, ammonia smell of horse piss coming out of the stables that housed the horses filled the gullies and drains. Those aromas do nothing for some; others dislike them so intensely that it repels them immediately. I was overcome with delight. Even forty years later I can still smell it and I can see in front of me that little Exmoor pony, Conker, with his mealy muzzle and wonky trot.

      Conker stood on a bed of yellow straw, behind a huge, creosoted stable door that he could barely see over, he’d rest his chin on the top of the door and look skyward. The straw was dusty but smelt fresh and I was timid in the company of this huge creature that stood peering down at me. In reality he was tiny but from the eyes of a six-year old boy he looked an equine giant. There was a water bucket that needed refilling and I opened the top latch and walked into the stable to reach it. I thought he would swing round and kick me but he didn’t. Instead, he put his nose forward and nickered and nuzzled the top of my head. When I went to pick up his bucket he moved backwards so as not to frighten me. I darted out of the door, filled the bucket to the top with water and went back into his stable. He did nothing, just looked at me, then he came forward and put his nose in the bucket and gulped great mouthfuls of water. I backed away, still afraid that he might hurt me. His throat contracted and expanded as he swallowed the water, then he came towards me and slobbered water flecked with grain from his last meal all down my arm. I just stood there looking at him in wonder.

      Conker wasn’t the first pony I had come across but he was the nicest. He smelt like a bar of mouldy soap. I could rub my face in his mane, and my hands in his coat and they would come out covered in a sticky, waxy coating of scurf. It was one of the most delicious smells I had ever come across. He was small, just over twelve hands, and I would often ride him bare-back in order to get the scurf to stick to my trousers so that I could smell them later and remind myself of him. He had a funny gait, almost lopsided, but he was very gentle with it.

      Aged six, stuck in London and toiling with parentally imposed chores, I threw tantrums when it came to piano lessons and extra school tuition. The only place I wanted to be was in the stables with the horses. Such was my passion that once, when a great brute of a pony stood on my foot, rather than push him off I stood there wallowing in the pleasure of the excruciating pain. When I eventually pulled my foot from under his iron-clad hoof I saw that it had taken the skin off the top of four toes. They were bruised and bleeding but I was very proud of my injury, and for weeks afterwards I would look at the bruised and battered foot and think only of how much happiness the incident had given me.

      ‘Why can’t we live in the country, where the horses are?’ I repeatedly asked my mother. Throughout my childhood I pestered my parents to move. Once, my mum drove me into the country and there, behind a post and rails fence, was the most perfect black Welsh cob I had ever seen. He was in a field with a ramshackle house next to it surrounded by acres of wide-open space. I turned to my mum and said: ‘Are we coming to live here?’ She told me that we were, ‘But not just yet.’ It was an unintentionally cruel thing to say, and it wouldn’t have been practical, at least not for her. I, on the other hand, could think of nothing more perfect.

      The most misguided hope I fostered was a return to Slades Farm in Somerset, to reclaim the family holding. My grandfather Percy had somewhat rashly let a part of it to the Bennett family, and with it the Bennetts acquired an agricultural tenancy – which could have lasted for generations. The three Hazzard sisters, of whom my mother was one, had been forced into the sale, in as much as they could not get vacant possession over the farm so it was worth considerably less than it might have been and consequently did not get a great price for it. I had

Скачать книгу