Frankie: The Autobiography of Frankie Dettori - Frankie Dettori

Скачать книгу

of the right wing clipped the top of the bank. This sent us cartwheeling into the ground on the other side of the ditch. The noise of the impact seemed to last forever.

      It was a nightmare sound I’ll never forget.

      At a time like this you have no control over your fate. If the plane had ended upside down we would all have been trapped in the wreckage and burned to death. There would have been no escape as more than sixty gallons of aviation fuel ignited. Even though we settled the right way up, the force of the impact left Ray unconscious for a few seconds, and I was out of it too.

      When we came to our senses we were still strapped in our seats, with the passenger door on my left squashed in on top of me. No escape route there. In front of us poor Patrick was slumped unconscious over the controls, flames were coming from the engines and the horrible smell of fuel was overpowering. I was already aware of a dreadful pain in my right leg. There was also so much blood on my face from deep cuts on my forehead that I thought I’d been blinded. Ray immediately took charge, thank goodness, or I wouldn’t be here to tell the tale.

      Spotting that the tiny door used to stow baggage immediately behind my seat was ajar, he kicked the rest of it out, then squeezed forward again to undo my seat belt, dragged me backwards and pushed me out of the narrow opening. The drop onto the ground was probably no more than eighteen inches but I landed on my injured ankle and immediately began screaming from the pain, unable to move.

      Lying in a heap near the remains of the tail plane, I was still far from safe.

      Terrified that I could be trapped by the flames at any moment, I cried out to Ray for help as he was turning back to try to save Patrick. When he heard me he came back, pushed himself through the broken hatch and dragged me thirty yards or more to safety just as the fire was really starting to take hold.

      Then he immediately rushed back determined to rescue Patrick, but by the time he reached the wreckage flames were beginning to appear underneath the plane. Ray should have given up at that point but he was unbelievably brave. Showing total disregard for his own safety, he forced open the pilot’s door on the right-hand side, leaned in, reached towards Patrick and was just about to release his belt when there was a whoosh and the whole lot went up.

      Driven back by the ferocity of the inferno and already suffering from burns, Ray then struggled round to the other side of the plane to have another go through the hatch that had provided our escape. By now the first rescuer had appeared, a racecourse worker, who was begging Ray at the top of his voice to get away from the flames, yet still he persisted.

      The last image I have of this incredible rescue attempt was of Ray taking off his jacket and trying to use it to beat out the flames, then collapsing in tears of rage, overcome with guilt at being unable to save Patrick, before crawling over to comfort me.

      We lay huddled together in an advanced state of shock, like two small refugees silhouetted by the fire. Then the cavalry began to arrive. Soon we were both trussed up and on our way by helicopter to Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge. The last thing we wanted after our ordeal was to be flying again so soon, but we were in no condition to argue.

      As we lay in emergency, shocked, hurting and distressed, neither of us knew quite how badly we were injured. I remember thinking: Why go on as a jockey? What’s the point? I had a lovely wife and a bouncy little son. There was so much more to life than racing. Why not jump off the treadmill and take things easy for a change?

      Then I began to realise that God had saved me. I was going to die and he spared me. Why? Obviously it wasn’t my time. And because my life almost ended far too soon, I decided there and then that I was going to make the most of it the second time around.

       Two Against the Odds

      As a small boy I wanted to be a petrol pump attendant when I grew up. Well, the price of petrol was very high then. It seemed like a rewarding career. Later I fancied myself as a professional footballer, but it was my destiny to become a jockey. My dad Gianfranco was champion jockey thirteen times in Italy and also won lots of big races in England, but he didn’t sit on a horse until he was twenty and stumbled into racing by chance after he left the family home in Sardinia to seek fame and fortune on the mainland.

      His father Mario, my grandfather, had an iron will. He stood little more than 5ft 2in tall and came from a family who were often penniless. He was a man’s man—tough, stubborn, hard as nails—and could be an absolute bastard. We all called him Super Mario and you will soon understand why. He was doing odd building jobs, earning money where he could—sometimes in the mines at Carbonia—when Italy became involved in the Second World War in June 1941 as an ally of Germany.

      Soon the Germans were everywhere in Sardinia with several army barracks, but at least there was no fighting on the island. Once my grandfather joined the Italian Army he was based full-time in barracks, which was a bit of a problem because his wife Apollonia lived thirty miles away from the camp. He used to tell me stories of how he cycled over to see her whenever he was free. Since the tyres on the bicycle were old and worn, his journey would often be interrupted by punctures which he mended with the crudest of equipment.

      Mario’s love for my grandmother cost him dear. When he failed to return to camp in time one Monday morning he was put on a charge and locked in a cell for a month. The second time it happened they tied him to a pole in the middle of a courtyard and left him there for several days, maybe a week. Ants creeping all over his body made him so itchy that they nearly drove him mad. In desperation he shook the pole so hard that it broke and came crashing down and he was put in a cell once more. You might think that he had learned his lesson by then, but the Dettoris are resolute in matters of the heart. Once he’d completed his sentence he rushed off for a reunion with my grandmother and failed to return to barracks before the curfew yet again.

      This time there was no escaping serious punishment. Mario was immediately sent to the front at Montecassino early in 1944, where one of the fiercest battles of the war was raging around the famous monastery—which was eventually destroyed by Allied bombers after months of heavy fighting. It came at the point in the war when the Allies were trying to drive the Germans out of Italy. Casualties were horribly high in the battle for Montecassino, south of Rome. It was a bloodbath. Mario told me he spent six months crouching in the trenches there and escaped with no more than a small scratch on his arm from a stray bullet.

      The way he told it to me years later, rain fell for weeks on end and the only way he managed to keep himself from sinking into the mud at night was by sleeping on a lilo in the trenches. He smoked incessantly, and quickly learned never to put his head above the parapet—for the very good reason that those who did immediately came under fire, often with fatal results.

      Once Italy was liberated by the Allies, Mario returned home to Sardinia and started working in the local mines at Carbonia which supplied coal for much of the mainland. Since he was a builder he had the perilous job of erecting a barrier with bricks and cement at great speed to stop fire spreading whenever it broke out. This required great skill and courage because he was obviously the last man out when a fire started. Mining was much more primitive then and he saved quite a few lives.

      My grandparents had six children, all boys, but one died at birth. Pepe was the oldest followed by Gianfranco, Salvatore, Sandro, and finally Sergio. Eventually Mario left the mines and began his own building business, though there were months at a time when he was unemployed. As the boys grew up and left school they all began working for him. My dad remained at school until he was sixteen, which was like going to university in those days in such a poor community.

      My dad was pretty cute and soon realised there was more to life than toiling away for his father for ten hours or more a day, mixing cement for the modest reward of just a bowl of pasta with beans and a roof over his head. After months of hard labour he couldn’t see any sort of future. So, one day, with huge blisters on his hands, he hurled his bucket and shovel into a well and informed my grandfather that he was leaving home. Mario’s response was typical: as my dad walked away he heard Mario shouting that he needn’t bother to return.

Скачать книгу