Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

Daylight Second
Daylight Second
Daylight Second
Ebook443 pages7 hours

Daylight Second

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

()

Read preview

About this ebook

The incredible story, for the first time told in novel form, of Phar Lap, the racehorse that became a champion, and then a legend.

Phar Lap first ... daylight second. It became a familiar refrain from racecallers as the great horse tore up every race track and record, becoming the people's champion in 1930s Australia and abroad. For those closest to the mighty stallion it would be the ride of their lives, on and off the track, as careers, relationships and fortunes were made and lost in just a few years of unrivalled glory.

Award winning author Kelly Ana Morey takes the reader beyond the racetrack histories and the popular mythologies and, for the first time in novel form, brings to life the characters and the times that turned Phar Lap into the legend he remains to this day.

Equal parts tragedy, triumph, thriller and mystery, Daylight Second has a heart as big as Phar Lap himself.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateOct 1, 2016
ISBN9781775490890
Daylight Second
Author

Kelly Ana Morey

Kelly Ana Morey is a New Zealand writer living in Kaipara. She is the author of five novels. Her latest book, Daylight Second, a novel about Phar Lap, was published in 2016. Kelly was born in 1968 of Ngati Kuri, Te Rarawa and Te Aupouri descent.

Related to Daylight Second

Related ebooks

General Fiction For You

View More

Related articles

Reviews for Daylight Second

Rating: 3.500000025 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

4 ratings1 review

What did you think?

Tap to rate

Review must be at least 10 words

  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    New Zealand born Phar Lap became the favourite of the Australian racetracks during the depression years. Born in Seadown, Timaru in 1926, trained in Australia where he set new track and race records, to his final race in Mexico and his untimely death there in 1932, this book spans the lives of horse trainer Harry Telford (1877-1960) and Phar Lap's constant companion Tommy Woodcock (1905-1985). Harry's research into his bloodlines see an ungainly colt with a warty face known as 'Lot 41', grow up into a gigantic chestnut gelding who was so good that he received death threats and even an attempted shooting. An imagined biography and tale of two very different marriages, those of Harry and Tommy, this book gives a great insight into life in those depression years as well as human failings, egos and high stakes.

Book preview

Daylight Second - Kelly Ana Morey

PROLOGUE

3 September, 1960

This death, reflects Harry Telford as he lies in the men’s ward for the hopeless, the terminal and the not long for this world at Bacchus Marsh Hospital, has been a slow one in the making. Vi, if she’d stuck around, would say he’d been dying since ’32 and in a way she’d be right. But Vi’s been gone for nearly twenty years now. What a carry on that had been. The discovery that there was a whole part of her life missing from all that she had told him about herself. How do you keep something like that secret for so long?

So that had been another nail in Harry’s coffin, another crack in his already fractured heart. The one thing that could have been absolved by forgiveness and never was, and that was his own fault. If only I had been a better man. What had it really mattered in the long run, this thing she had done, long before she met him?

How do you keep something like that secret for so long?

Little deaths. One by one they add up, killing a man inch by inch. It had taken old age to catch up with his broken heart. You’d have thought after everything that had happened that luck might have stayed around a bit longer. But it hadn’t. Lady Luck had ridden out of Harry’s life on Bobbie’s back as the gelding shuddered his last far from home. Harry knew he should have gone to America with Bobbie, but he couldn’t, not with all of his other racing commitments — he had been a successful trainer back then, and the little one so sick. She’d died anyway, the little one, even though he’d stayed. And those horses and owners that Bobbie had brought to Braeside, they left too. Harry counts the deaths. First Bobbie, then the little girl, a baby who barely lived, his marriage and now, decades later, this, his own last stand.

He can hear women’s voices, white-winged and already writing eulogies as they hover and settle, plump-breasted and cooing, around the beds of their dying men. Harry wishes one of those soft voices belonged to Vi, but it’s been years since he’s seen her. She is a ghost of unhappiness in this clean, sunlit room, another regret. And Harry has more than his fair share of those. He’s been happy these last years that he’s lived out at Underbank, helping out around the place as much as he’s been able, but really living off Sol Green’s charity. But at least there’s still been horses. The Underbank mares will start foaling soon, and this is another regret of Harry’s, that he won’t see this year’s crop of foals. So much hope centred on each life that slides out of its dam and struggles to its feet. Each a product of three hundred years of breeding and refining, designed to do one thing and one thing only: get from A to B in the quickest time possible.

‘Who’s that?’ he croaks harshly as he feels someone approach his bed. ‘Vi? Is that you?’

‘Just me, Dad,’ replies Cappy, who’s been called here by Sol Green to watch his father die. ‘Just me.’ They’d found Harry in the mare barn a few days before, a crumpled heap, rendered near senseless by a stroke. Harry had wanted to die at Underbank with the smell of horses all around him in the small dusty room above the mare barn, but it wasn’t to be. They’d taken him off to hospital where the doctors had said there was nothing to be done except wait.

‘Is it time?’ Harry asks.

‘There, there, Dad,’ Cappy says, avoiding the question.

Harry sighs. There’s no straight answers in this world. Things are becoming garbled as his brain starts to shut down at the approach of the final finish line. Harry thinks he can hear those pesky Jameson kids who lived next door to them in Randwick back in the old days when he and Vi were first starting out together. They appear to be playing some kind of game outside his window with the other neighbourhood larrikins. It involves a lot of shouting, cheering too, and the soft dull thud of a rapidly deflating rubber ball being hit by a length of timber. Harry wonders whether Cappy’s out there, holding up the side for the Telfords, forgetting in this jumble of last thoughts that his son, now a grown man with children of his own, was still a babe in arms when they lived in Sydney.

Cappy drove up to Bacchus Marsh yesterday to say goodbye while Harry was still lucid. Harry can’t remember what happened last night, though recalls with absolute clarity how on Melbourne Cup Day in 1931, Phar Lap’s third crack at the big race, Dave Davis’s wife, he can’t remember her name, wore a dress of the most perfect cornflower blue that matched her eyes, and the look of dismay on her face when Bobbie ran a sorry eighth. It had been down to the handicappers, they’d piled the weight on Phar Lap for the Cup, and Bobbie had been a bit under the weather too all through race week. Eighth! From hero to also-ran in just one year. Harry tries to bring up the issue of the handicappers with Cappy — who’s heard it all before a thousand times — but to Harry’s immense annoyance he finds the words won’t come. He can hear them in his head, he’s said them often enough, but they don’t appear to be able to get from there to the tip of his tongue. He clutches at the bedspread with both gnarled hands in frustration.

‘What is it, Dad?’ asks Cappy.

Harry feels rather than sees his son leaning over him. A faint shadow, the memory of his son, is momentarily cast across this, Harry’s twilight. ‘I want to talk to your mother,’ Harry tries to say. But again words fail him, though they’re as clear as a bell in his head. Harry sighs inwardly at his failure to communicate. Not that it matters; he can’t remember what it was he wanted to talk to Vi about in any case. He can no longer feel his feet and wonders if that’s how it will be, that death will claim him from the toes up. The thought that he will be in charge of his mind to the very end cheers him, and he thinks that as far as deaths go this probably isn’t such a bad one, though he wishes the kids next door would pipe down.

‘Has he passed?’ Harry hears Cappy ask. Harry wonders who his son is talking about. He would very much like to open at least one eye and glare at his only surviving child, but even this simple message is failing to transmit from his brain to the appropriate body part. Cappy takes one of his father’s hands, squeezing it tightly so that his father knows he’s there. Harry likes that. It feels good. But he wishes Vi was here too.

He remembers that day they first met, years ago now. She was called Elvira Frances May Ohmsen back then. The daughter of an accountant and housewife from Singleton, New South Wales. A shop girl at Mark Foy’s department store in Sydney. Harry knew right from the moment he set eyes on her that she was the one. He wasn’t a young bloke either, with his head turned by every pretty girl. The only thing that surprised him was that Vi returned his interest, allowing him to court her. Then she agreed to marry him. A racehorse trainer with limited prospects! An old bugger too. Well, who saw that coming? And they were happy too, in the beginning, he thinks, though the difficult times had well outnumbered the good days. She stood by him and put her best face on it through the worst of it. ‘Through sickness and health, good times and bad, Harry,’ she reminded him on more than one occasion when they were struggling even to put food on the table and the creditors were mounting up. And he was grateful to her for the glimmer of faith in him that seemed so constant that he thought nothing could extinguish it. Things had come right for him when Bobbie started winning and they moved to Braeside and yet somehow after that it started to unravel between him and Vi. Good old Vi. Now she had been a stroke of good luck, but like Bobbie she hadn’t stayed the distance. Though if he had to live it all over again he wouldn’t hesitate to bet it all on her, but do it a bit better. Funny how it had turned out, though. From rags to riches and back to rags again in just ten years.

Though greater fortunes had been won and lost in less time throughout history, none matters more to Harry than his own small tragedy. He was never much of a betting man until he couldn’t afford to be. All the money Bobbie brought to him trickled away into Braeside and the open hands of the bookies and the trainer’s halo of success that the big chestnut gelding also presented to him on a velvet cushion became increasingly tarnished with each loss by a Telford horse. It didn’t take long before people started to say once more that Harry wasn’t any good as a trainer. That Phar Lap was a horse so good that even Harry Telford couldn’t slow him down. If only I’d gone to Agua Caliente with him. Then maybe the big fella wouldn’t have died and luck would have stayed around. It was bad luck too that Dave Davis neglected to insure the horse, forgot because he was too busy, had his head turned by Hollywood and the glamour of Agua Caliente and didn’t think for a moment about Bobbie. It’s an old refrain, one that’s been playing in Harry’s head since 1932. Of course he couldn’t go to America with Bobbie, not with the baby so sickly and Vi all cut up about it and a full stable of gallopers to train at Braeside. Braeside. Harry counts himself a lucky man that he even had a property like Braeside. He was a bread-and-butter trainer who ended up on one of those places that a man generally only dreams of — post-and-rail fences, a grass training track, cedar stables and a staff of more than two dozen. There was the nice house too, his gift to Vi, and a Dodge and a driver to take her anywhere she wanted. But it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t the lack of money when things turned bad that made Vi leave. It was lack of love and compassion and forgiveness. If he’d simply taken her in his arms and whispered ‘It doesn’t matter’, maybe she would have stayed.

‘I’m sorry,’ he tries to say to Vi’s ghost, but it’s too late. There are no words and time has run out.

Other regrets. Bobbie. Yes, Bobbie. There had been no other choice, not really, other than for the horse to leave Australia. He’d been all but weighted out of Australia. But Harry’s gut instinct told him it was a mistake. Just like the third run at the Cup. He knew the horse was a bit off and the weight . . . Well, you didn’t want to get Harry started on what the handicapper piled on Bobbie for that third go at the Cup. Harry always reckoned running eighth broke Bobbie’s heart. Then Davis took his vindication about taking Bobbie to America with the win in the Agua Caliente Cup. Ten days later Bobbie died a shabby death. Arsenic they said, the veterinarians over in America. The Mob, some said. Others favoured poisoned trees or contaminated feed. This, the things people said, would become Phar Lap’s truth. They flayed his eviscerated carcass, boiled the meat from his bones and put his 14-pound heart in a jar of alcohol before shipping him home in pieces. The preserved heart was placed in a museum, on a shelf beside a jar containing the normal sized heart of a horse, so Australian children could look at it and go back to school and write stories about Phar Lap and his gigantic Australian heart. It was their history and it said something about the size of their antipodean hearts. Like Ned Kelly or Don Bradman or Phar Lap, somehow they all had the potential to be heroes.

Harry opens his eyes. It takes all his will to manage this simple bodily task. Cappy, hovering above him, tears streaming down his face, notices immediately. ‘Dad?’ he whispers.

Harry would like to squeeze Cappy’s hand that he can no longer feel holding his own, but can’t. ‘Sorry,’ he rasps, shutting his eyes once more and readying himself for those last few lengths to the finish line and the explosion of light, then darkness as his stride falters, then fails.

They bury Harry at Bacchus Marsh cemetery with less than a dozen gathering at the graveside to pay their final respects. The only family member to attend is Cappy, with his wife Nancy. It has been almost thirty years since Phar Lap won the Melbourne Cup, and Harry is but a footnote in history. When his headstone is erected later, Harry’s legacy to the world is recorded on its surface not as a trainer of horses or adored husband, but Beloved Father, because Cappy, unlike everyone else, has stayed the distance.

PART ONE

Blood and Bone

CHAPTER ONE

Harry

Harry’s first memory is of being put on a horse by his dad. The Telfords don’t have much in the way of spare change so there is no photograph to trigger this recollection, it just resides in the complicated soft tissue of Harry’s imagination, occasionally revealing itself, just for a moment, clear as the day it was newly made. He can’t guess at what age he is in this watery flash-card from his past. Old enough to be able to sit up and grab a chunk of mane in both plump fists. The most vivid part of the memory is the slow echo of his old man, Henry Telford, telling him to hold tight ‘like your life depends on it’. He sees in extraordinary detail the thin wisps of mane in front of him and his own small hands reaching out to grasp those black wiry filaments of hair as he hears the bright, true ring of his dad’s voice. The lesson will stay with Harry throughout his life, because he will always be hanging on, one way or another.

It’s a wet night with an evil wind whipping in off the ice floes to the south of New Zealand. That’s Invercargill, though, cold as a witch’s tit. The Telfords sit close to the fire, John, Harry and Hugh tumbled together on the hearth rug, William still just a baby and being rocked by his mother. Their sister Mary Jane has already been put to bed.

‘Who were the foundation stallions?’ Henry asks his sons.

‘The Godolphin Arabian,’ pipes up John, the oldest.

‘The Byerley Turk,’ adds Harry.

‘And the Darley Arabian,’ finishes off Hugh. They know this history by heart: it’s knowledge they’ll never forget and will guide their choices when it comes to horses the whole of their collective lives. In a few years Mary Jane and William will join the refrain, each taking parts as their older siblings have before them.

‘Well done,’ says Henry. ‘Who was the first?’

‘The Byerley Turk,’ replies John. ‘Arrived in England in 1698.’

‘Very good, John,’ says Henry. ‘Now the arrival of the Byerley Turk was important, but he wasn’t the first barb to be brought to England. The horses in England up until this time were big, heavy enough to pull a plough in peacetime and carry a rider in full armour to war. They were slow but strong. It was when we began to fight the heathens that the barbs began to be noticed.’ It never occurs to any of the boys to ask why the heathens needed fighting. It is beyond their ken, as are those far-off countries they come from. They understand the bit about the horses, though. ‘And these jokers,’ continues Henry, ‘had a completely different idea of cavalry to us. Their horses, the barbs, were small and light, but they were fast and could go all day so they started bringing them back to England. So gentlemen who liked to sport on their horses began to pit them against each other in races, so these jokers started to breed lighter and faster horses, using the barbs across their heavy horses, and it didn’t take them too long either to create what we think of as the thoroughbred. Bigger and stronger than the barbs, but finer and faster than the draughthorses of England. Though we think of thoroughbreds as purebred they are a mongrel breed, really. That’s why they come in so many different shapes and sizes.’

The boys ponder on this. They’ve all known a fair few racehorses already in their short lives and their dad is right. There’s some that look like show hacks and others you’d reckon would look quite at home pulling a cart. Though their dad will always tell them that provided a horse is put together pretty much right and has a good set of legs and feet on it, the only other thing that matters is what the bloodlines say — and how fast they can get down the track. Names like Eclipse, Hyperion, Carbine, Glare, Isinglass and Miss Kate have become more familiar than nursery rhymes to the Telford boys. Henry also teaches them that as a rule of thumb sprinters are those horses that are short-coupled, naturally well-muscled and nuggety. Their big hind quarters give them the power to explode down a track in a very fast time, but they have no staying power. ‘A sprinter will show well early on,’ Henry tells his sons, ‘when the races are short. But once they get to four and the races get longer, they become rabbits who simply set the pace for the stayers behind them. Owners like these types of horses’ — Henry correctly assumes that all his sons will work with horses — ‘because they get an early return on them. But their legs are usually gone by the time they’re four. Whereas a stayer will be only starting to peak at the same age. What does a stayer look like, Hugh?’

‘Like a greyhound, Dad, sleek and lean with a long back and legs, sloping shoulder and hindquarters.’

‘Good boy.’

The chestnut mare spooks at the flickering light of the lantern that Mr Goodman is holding in the aisle in front of the boxes. Harry and his mate Gabe, who has just turned seventeen so is a bit older and more experienced, are tacking up the first two for morning gallops. It’s brutally cold and Harry’s fingers, usually so deft at this simple job, are clumsy. The mare, who’s nervy at the best of times, won’t stand still, and this isn’t making Harry’s job any easier.

‘Hurry up, Telford,’ says Mr Goodman. He’s standing in a draught that feels straight off the Southern Alps. The winter of 1893 is proving to be a cold one, and his feet are rapidly turning to blocks of ice.

Harry swears softly and jabs the mare in the ribs with his thumb, which doesn’t help, because it never does with Missy who needs to be handled with patience and tact. Finally he gets the girth buckled up and leads the mare out to where Gabe is waiting with a three-year-old gelding so slow they call him Treacle. The mare, flighty though she is, has a good turn of speed and for this reason she’s being galloped out with the slowest horse in the string Mr Goodman trains out of Dunedin. The sky is starting to lighten and they can make out the white rails that surround the track. By the time they’ve slowly trotted and cantered Treacle and Miss Hotchkiss, as Missy is known in the Stud Book, around to the backside of the track there will be enough light for the gallop home. The grass and gravel are white from the overnight frost. The powdery ice crunches underfoot as Missy dances sideways and chews nervously at her bit. She’s got a world-class spook on her. Many’s the time she has dropped her shoulder on Harry and disappeared out from underneath him. She always gallops all the way back to the stables when she leaves him on the ground. It’s a long walk back when all the other exercise riders and trainers are ribbing you. Treacle plods along with his head low, Gabe barely holding the reins, completely unaffected by the mare’s antics. Other trainers and horses with their exercise boys up in the stirrups are moving out of the rows of stables. Talk is minimal: a few comment on how cold it is, but these are men who by necessity are a taciturn bunch at the best of times. Smiling and small talk are kept for race days, special, like the best china that comes out only once in a good year.

‘Just slowly increase your speed, Telford. Let’s try and trick the lazy beggar into galloping honest.’

‘Righto, Mr Goodman.’

‘And you, Milford, I want you to encourage old Treacle here to rise to the occasion.’ Gabe waves his whip in agreement. They’d talked about Mr Goodman’s latest ploy to get Treacle to put in a bit more effort when doing the last check of the stables the night before. ‘And if he does try, even a little bit, hold off on the whip. Praise him instead.’

Mr Goodman knows that the gelding, a stable favourite because he is such a sweetheart, has a gallop in him. It’s just locating and then exploiting it. Beating the toffee out of the horse hasn’t made the slightest difference. They all like Treacle, that’s the problem — even Mr Goodman, who hasn’t felt good about trying to bully the gelding into activity. But this is the horse’s last chance: unless he rouses himself out of his Sunday canter mentality he will be on the way out. As a gelding his only hope beyond the racetrack is to find a riding-hack home or it will be off to the knacker’s yard for him. Sending the friendly ones to the knackers or the hounds doesn’t sit well with anyone at the stables. Some horses, though, the crazy ones, need to go to heaven. On that they’re all agreed.

‘Reckon it will work?’ asks Gabe as he and Harry jog their horses around the track together to where they’ll start the morning’s gallop.

Treacle is having a soporific effect on the chestnut, who for once isn’t fighting for her head. Harry slides the reins a few inches through his fingers, rewarding Missy for good behaviour. ‘Dunno, maybe. Worth a try anyway,’ he replies.

‘Treacle might teach Missy to go slow.’

‘Bullet for the pair of them if that’s the case,’ says Harry, who has already felt the mare pick up under him as they near their usual starting post.

For horses like Missy, the will to run is innate. The primeval flight mechanism has been maintained by careful and not-so-careful breeding of thoroughbreds over two centuries even though it makes absolutely no sense. There’s nothing to run from now except men and the whip, but good racehorses are the ones that haven’t worked this out yet. They’re the ones that gallop as if their lives depend on it.

‘See you at the finish line,’ Harry shouts, getting up over the top of the mare and shortening his reins once more. He and Gabe already ride almost as well as the jockeys they admire, and have numerous race rides under their belts despite their tender years. The apprentice pay is nothing to write home about, but what a job for a boy who knows about horses. Even these cold mornings are relatively short-lived. The New Zealand spring and autumn and their perfect days extend the summer, and the best thing in the world is to ride out bright and early when the mist is still on the ground and the sun is rising. As they break for home Harry keeps a hold on Missy, though it doesn’t seem fair on her, and waits the couple of strides it takes for Gabe to hassle Treacle up beside them. Gabe is gently hand-riding the gelding, chattering away to him — ‘Come on, boy, you can do it, come on.’ He looks over to Harry and nods, so Harry lets Missy out a couple of notches. She immediately accelerates. With the mare once more in front, Gabe hand-and-voice rides again until Treacle catches up once more and maintains the pace Missy is setting. They go through the process one more time, and the gelding once again catches and holds onto the pace until they cross the finish line Mr Goodman imposed.

He has had the clock on them, and when they trot the horses back to where he waits the first thing the boys want to know is Treacle’s time, because Gabe could have sworn he felt a flicker of fire beneath the gelding’s insouciance. Nothing life-changing, except for poor Treacle maybe, but the start of something. ‘How did he go, Mr Goodman?’ asks Gabe on the noticeably drooping Treacle.

‘Good enough, good enough,’ Goodman says, putting his stopwatch back in his raincoat pocket.

‘Aw, come on, Boss,’ protests Gabe.

Goodman relents. ‘Two-second improvement on his best time. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It was still a slow time. We’ll do it again tomorrow. Now get those two back to the stables and the next pair out. We haven’t got all day.’

The boys ride back to the stables chattering about the gallop and Treacle’s inexplicable rise to the occasion. Over five furlongs, two seconds is an impressive improvement. The morning has arrived by the time they’re out on the next two. It’s going to be one of those winter days when the sky is an expanse of impenetrable blue undisgraced by a single cloud. The sun shines bright but without warmth, like a great yellow diamond in the sky.

As it happens, Mr Goodman’s experiment does the trick with Treacle. He never becomes a stakes horse but he does learn to gallop fast enough to earn his way and pay his proud owner a handy little dividend in the three years he will be pounded down the racetrack before his legs give out. And no knacker’s yard for Treacle either. His owner will give him to a cousin in the Hawkes Bay who owns a big spread near the coast, and Treacle, who keeps his stable name, will spend the next twenty years of his life carrying two generations of Sweeney girls to school, sometimes three at a time, and wandering happily in the orchard where every evening he will be given a bucket of chaff and a handful of crushed oats by an ever-changing parade of little girls who adore him. So Treacle will have a good ending to his story, one that neither Harry nor Gabe will ever know.

They are both there for Missy’s end, though. A few weeks later, at morning gallops, they’re coming down the straight, Harry and Gabe up, a couple of lengths from home with Treacle matching Missy stride for stride when the fiery little mare missteps, shattering her front off-side cannon bone. Within five minutes she’s been put out of her misery with a single bullet between her eyes. Her carcass is picked up by the local hunt for the hounds. The following day Treacle will gallop with another fast chestnut mare and barely notice the difference in his running mate, proving that there is nothing, except maybe a cat, that is less sentimental than a horse.

From his time with Mr Goodman, whom he would leave in 1897, Harry takes away three lessons. One, never be afraid to try something new; two, death and horses go hand in hand; three and most important, he’s not the type for staying in the same place for too long.

‘There’s a fair bit of work here,’ Harry writes from Oamaru to his younger brother Hugh who has just got his jockey licence and has started race riding, ‘more than enough for the two of us.’ Hugh needs no more prompting, joining Harry as soon as he can pack his bag. The Telford boys, both still kids really, get a sweet little operation up and running in no time. They don’t commit to any stable in particular, which works for the trainers in the area who all want the Telfords to exercise and race ride for them. And it’s a good time for the boys, two youngsters with little in the way of needs and a couple of bob always jingling in their pockets.

‘Here we are, folks, they’re gathering in the saddling enclosure now for the 1899 Kudrow Cup. And it’s a good field today. We have the Telford boys, Harry and Hugh, up on Ilex and Remorse, both of whom look likely prospects and the tote agrees. Oh, young Hugh Telford is in a spot of bother with Remorse putting on a bit of a show.’

‘May the best man win,’ Hugh says to Harry, once he’s got Remorse back under control.

‘Loser cooks our tea for the next two weeks,’ Harry replies.

‘You’re on,’ Hugh fires back and ends up on cooking duty when the Telfords take the Kudrow Cup quinella with Harry bringing Ilex over the finish line slightly ahead of Remorse.

Harry’s wanderlust won’t be quieted for long, though.

‘But jeez, Harry, we’ve got a good thing going here,’ protests Hugh after morning gallops a few months later.

‘I know,’ replies Harry, who has just told his brother that he has accepted a job in Wellington with trainers Jack ‘Cocky’ Lowe and Dan

O’Brien. He doesn’t even understand himself why he feels compelled to walk away from this lucrative little set-up he and Hugh have down here in Oamaru. He feels restless but he doesn’t know what for, or why his feet keep wanting to carry him forever forward. But their mother is delighted about Harry’s move up north — youngest brother William has just taken up an apprenticeship with Jack Lowe’s stables.

‘Hello, young larrikin,’ Harry says on the first morning the two are together at Lowe’s yard.

‘I’ve got a letter for you from Ma,’ replies William, who can’t disguise his relief at having a brother here at Lowe’s.

‘Dear Harry,’ Mary writes, ‘please keep an eye on your brother.’ William is Mary’s baby boy and although she’s used to the men in her family disappearing to chase horses, this last one has proved the hardest to let go. Harry does as his mother bids, not that he stays very long at Lowe’s.

Soon enough he’s out on his own again, training and riding Aide-de-camp, a horse he and his brothers have picked up cheap from a disappointed owner whose trainer has failed to get much of a tune out of the gelding. Harry thinks that if he gets the horse away from Wellington and runs him on the tracks on the west coast of the South Island he’ll get away with his triple role as owner, trainer and jockey, which is frowned upon by the New Zealand Racing Authority. Sadly for Harry it doesn’t take long for them to catch up with him, even though he ‘sells’ his share of Aide-de-camp to his brothers.

‘The bloody bastards!’ exclaims Hugh, who has drifted up north to join Harry and William in Wellington. The three run into each other at Trentham racetrack. It’s a mid-week meeting and both Hugh and William have a couple of rides apiece. Harry doesn’t, having just had his application to renew his riding licence for the 1900-01 season turned down.

‘I reckon someone dobbed me in about Aide-de-camp,’ says Harry.

‘You told them you’d sold your share of the horse to us, didn’t you?’ asks Hugh, glancing quickly at the track clock. He has a ride up in the next hour so time is tight, and he still needs to get changed.

‘They wouldn’t have a bar of it,’ explains Harry. ‘Not much I can do about it now except take my medicine and hope they reinstate me next year.’

‘Jeez, what are you going to do, Harry?’ asks William, who has just steered his first ride of the day to a disappointing ninth in a field of twelve. He is enjoying the life at Lowe’s but is proving to have no real talent in the saddle, not even as much as Harry, and he’s nowhere near in the class of Hugh who is good both on the flat and over hurdles.

‘Time to go training, I reckon,’ replies Harry, though he’s taken on the role once more of stable manager at Lowe’s while he serves out his suspension. He’s an exceptional manager and runs a tight ship so he won’t starve, and there’s enough left over of his pay packet each week to keep Aide-de-camp in oats. ‘I’ve applied for my trainer’s licence.’

‘That’s not a bad idea,’ says Hugh. ‘If you train them, William and I can ride for you.’

‘That’s the idea,’ replies Harry.

‘Fingers crossed the bastards give you one, then,’ says Hugh, who rather likes the idea of them being their own bosses. Riding for other people is all very well, but working for them is a mug’s game.

But Harry is worried about this. He hasn’t put up much of a protest about having his riding licence suspended even though he could have after relinquishing ownership of the horse, because he wants to keep the peace with the Racing Authority who have been known in the past to hold personal grudges against individuals. His riding days are pretty much behind him, in any case. He’s always been too big to be a jockey, and now, well it’s getting harder and harder to keep himself wasted down to riding weight. ‘We’ll just have to wait and see,’ he says.

‘Surely they can’t turn you down,’ says Hugh, dragging the last lungful of smoke from his roll-your-own and grinding the end out under the heel of his riding boot. ‘Bloke’s got to make a living.’

‘No such thing as a done deal until it’s done,’ replies Harry philosophically.

‘Imagine,’ says William, who’s still young enough to see a silver lining in every stormy cloud. ‘Our own operation.’ And the trio of Telford boys, who like their father would much rather train and run their own string of horses than deal with owners, pause for a moment and allow their imaginations to contemplate the possibility. It looks good.

Harry’s trainer’s licence is granted in late 1901, not a minute too soon as far as he’s concerned. He has done a good job at Lowe’s but it’s time to move on. He hangs out his trainer’s shingle because he needs the money, although his real focus is putting together a string of Telford-owned horses. Aide-de-camp is quickly joined by Heritas, Stepson and Torowai, none of which are of any note so Harry has been able to pick them up cheap.

‘Reckon you can get a tune out of them?’ says Hugh at the yard Harry has leased at Trentham, looking at the line of doubtful prospects that are hanging prick-eared and bright-eyed over their stable doors in the hope that someone will feed them. Aide-de-camp nickers hopefully, though he should know by now that the Telfords don’t go around doling out extra feed rations.

‘I can try,’ says Harry. He doesn’t do too bad a job either, with consistent wins from the quartet over the next two years.

By December 1902 Harry is allowed to renew his jockey licence, though he doesn’t do much riding now.

Enjoying the preview?
Page 1 of 1