Authors: Christopher Bland
The thrill of seeing a stride, the crackle of the birch as the horses brush through the top of the fence, the shouts of the jockeys, ‘Give me room, damn you, give me room,’ the hard-bitten, leathery semi-professionals a sharp contrast to the Anglo-Irish amateurs, the
craic
in the dressing-room tent, the noise of the bookies calling out the odds, the comments of the crowd, ‘That one would be better off between the shafts of a turf-cart,’ it all makes the blood flow faster through John’s veins. He enjoys the danger and learns the darker arts quickly enough; he tries to come up on the inside of one of the hard men, who puts him through the wings of the fence rather than giving way.
‘You’ll not try that again in a hurry’ is his rival’s unsympathetic comment as they weigh in after the race.
John is a natural horseman, a good judge of pace, relaxed enough to leave an experienced horse alone, able to sit tight when he hits a fence hard. He can do eleven stone only by watching his weight during the season, and he can’t ride much of a finish, but he is soon in demand by owners with decent horses who want a sympathetic jockey.
He starts to ride out in the early morning with a local trainer, Paddy Brennan, who has a racing yard and a string of thirty point-to-pointers, hurdlers and chasers at Ballyroan about ten miles away from Burke’s Fort. His car is just man enough for the journey, and once the covering season is over he is able to get up early, drive over to Ballyroan, ride out his two on the gallops and get back to Burke’s Fort in time to lead The Elector out for his morning exercise.
The Elector shows no signs of exhaustion from his increased workload. By the summer he has come into his coat and looks as good as he did in the Dublin ring. Only John handles him – the other grooms, to whom Sean’s limp is a useful warning, are more than happy to deal with the mares, the foals and the geldings.
John comes back one morning after riding out to find a tall, dark-haired girl waiting in the stallion yard.
‘I’m Grania Mannion,’ she says. ‘You must be the stallion man.’
‘I am that,’ says John.
‘I am that! I am that! Come on now, I hear that’s not the way you always speak. I’d like to see The Elector, please.’
John smiles and says in his Sunday voice, ‘I’ll show you the horse,’ taking her over to the box.
He leads the stallion out and stands him in the yard while Grania studies both of them with a critical eye.
‘Plenty of bone,’ says Grania. ‘Can you trot him up while I look at him head on?’
John does so.
‘Is he quite correct?’
‘The Dublin judges thought so,’ says John, then sees the smile on Grania’s face and realizes he is being teased again.
‘We’ve two mares he would do nicely. We’re over at Collinstown, three miles away.’
‘You’ll need to get in the queue. He’s due to go out now to the paddock. You’ll see him move there.’
They walk to the paddock, John leading The Elector.
‘He’s quiet enough.’
‘He is with me.’
They lean on the gate and watch the stallion first trot, then canter around the field. The Elector plays to his little gallery, gives a couple of spirited bucks, then comes up to the gate and nuzzles John for a carrot.
‘He’s beautiful. He’s the real thing,’ says Grania. ‘I can see you’re in love with him all right.’ She puts her hand on John’s forearm for a moment. ‘I hope my mares pass the test.’
‘I hope so too,’ says John, turning to smile at her. She has green eyes, arched eyebrows, a straight nose, full lips.
‘You’re looking at me as if I was in the show ring,’ says Grania. ‘Is my conformation all right? Do I get a rosette?’
‘You do,’ says John, and thinks, she’s beautiful, she’s the real thing. As they walk back to the yard he surprises himself by asking if he can drive her home.
‘Only if you can fit my cob in the boot of your car. He’s in a stable in your big yard – Michael said that would be all right.’
In the big yard Grania takes her horse out of the box and stands there, leg bent at the knee, until John, transfixed, gives her a leg up.
‘Sorry.’
‘What for? Come over to check out my two mares on Thursday; my father’s away buying hay. He doesn’t like Englishmen.’
‘I’m not English. I’m a Kerry man,’ says John.
She smiles and trots out of the yard.
John has managed to banish Eileen, Drimnamore, Derriquin and Kerry to a remote and unvisited corner of his mind. He has had one short letter from Josephine, thanking him for her share of the money from the sale, and sent a reply describing his new life at Burke’s Fort. Neither letter mentioned the terrible weeks they had lived through together.
When he receives a letter with a Kerry postmark towards the end of April, he recognizes Josephine’s neat schoolmistress’s copperplate and remembers her insistence on a Waverley pen and Stephen’s blue-black ink. Even her crossings-out, two exactly parallel lines, are neat.
Driminabeg,
Drimnamore,
County Kerry
Dear John,
I am sorry to have been so long in writing, but the post has been almost non-existent this past two years, and I can only hope you get this letter in due course. We have been isolated in Drimnamore for many, many months. No post, no telegrams, no newspapers (plenty of rumours), roads trenched, railways and bridges blown up. We get an occasional visit from a coastal steamer with much needed supplies, but most of us live on what we can grow or exchange.
Since you left, Askive, Derreen and Dromquinna have been burned. Anyone with a car has had it commandeered by one side or the other. The Stokes, the Butlers and the Hartleys have gone to England; there are not more than six or seven of us in church of a Sunday, and we get a curate from Kenmare once a month, and then only if travel conditions permit.
Most of Kerry seems to be opposed to the Treaty. It has split several families, not least the Doyles. Mikey has joined the Free State Army, Donal is with the Republicans in Listowel. If the Treaty hadn’t been so identified with Michael Collins and the Cork men, I believe Kerry men would have found it easy to approve. Terrible things have been done by both sides. Most recently the Free Staters made ten captured Republicans stand over a land-mine at Ballyseedy Cross, which they then detonated, killing all but one. This in reprisal for the death of five of their own men at Knocknagoshel. And so it goes on.
The school continues although attendance is ragged owing to the state of the roads. None of us have been paid by the state for over a year, and we don’t know where to ask. Father Michael is friendly enough, but all save a few in Drimnamore avoid me if they can. I told anyone who would listen that your mother tried to save lives, as did Father Michael, but the preferred version is different.
Farm money is very low, as there is no means of getting anything to market, and one farm convoy guarded by Staters was ambushed by Republicans on the way to Kenmare and a soldier killed and a farmer from Waterville wounded and his horse dead.
I am sorry to sound so gloomy, but that is how things are, never to be the same again. I wish all was as before, but as your mother used to say, ‘Beggars would ride’.
Thank you again for the money, which has been a great help. Ambrose O’Halloran is keeping well, and tells me to tell you he remembers your first snipe as if it were yesterday.
Your affectionate cousin,
Josephine Deborah
John smiles at Josephine’s use of both her Christian names
.
The letter brings back the memories that he had successfully banished and it is two or three days before he can write a reply.
He posts the letter in Maryborough, and on the way back calls on Mannion’s farm to see the mares and Grania. The farm is a long, low building with a handsome Georgian fanlight over a central door leading straight into the kitchen.
‘We’ve horses, cattle, sheep, and you can see the chickens,’ says Grania as she comes out, shooing away a brown hen who tries to follow John in.
The kitchen is a surprise to John; two of the walls are solid bookshelves, the books well used. John picks out a book at random, a copy of Daniel O’Connell’s speeches.
‘That’s one of Mannion’s,’ says Grania as she gives him a cup of tea. ‘The politics are his, the poetry and the novels are mine.’
They talk about horses and bloodlines for a couple of minutes, long enough for John to realize that Grania knows more about breeding than he does. They go to the nearby paddock where her two mares are out at grass. They are both strong half-breds sired by decent thoroughbred stallions.
‘Middle-weight hunters, that’s what we’re after. What do you think?’
‘They’ll do. They’ll be suited by The Elector.’
‘Is there a special price for local farmers? Fifty’s a bit steep.’
‘You’ll get a hundred and fifty each for their yearlings,’ says John, laughing. ‘I told you we have a waiting list.’
‘Ninety pounds for the two – cash in your hand now,’ says Grania, who goes into the kitchen and comes back with a handful of notes. ‘No foal, no fee.’
John takes the money, and as he goes to put it in his back pocket Grania takes him by the hand.
‘Call yourself a Kerry man? You’re forgetting the luck-penny,’ she says, taking a ten-pound note back. ‘I’ll have a kiss as well,’ and kisses John on the cheek. ‘There, that’s done. I’ll bring the mares over as soon as they’re in season,’ she says, and goes back into the farmhouse.
T
HAT
NIGHT
J
OHN
doesn’t sleep well. He is twenty-three and the cautious kisses with Dublin girls at the Drimnamore Hotel, the more adventurous kisses in Big House gardens at hunt balls, the time in the summer house with Nesta Fitzmaurice, have not prepared him for the sudden strength of his feelings for Grania.
Grania had kissed him. Perhaps it was only the luck-penny. She’d put her hand on his arm. Perhaps it was only the beauty of The Elector. He falls asleep thinking of her green eyes, her black hair, her lips on his cheek, her long fingers lying on his sleeve, the feel of her knee when he boosted her onto her cob. He dreams of her clothed, half clothed, naked, coming to him, turning him away.
Three days later he has a ride at Punchestown in a novice chase; Paddy Brennan is putting him up on Hunting Cap, a promising five-year-old point-to-pointer.
‘He’s ready to cope with those fences; he’s a careful jumper, so he is. You qualified him with the hounds, you’ve ridden him out often enough. He needs a jockey who won’t nag at him, won’t keep telling him when to take off. And you’ve schooled him over our banks and stone walls.’
Schooling is one thing, taking those fences at racing pace quite another, thinks John. He walks around the course twice on the morning of the race, looking carefully at the unique mixture of obstacles, two regulation brush fences, all the rest stone walls or banks. The stone walls are solid blocks of stone up to three feet, then a dividing layer of turf, then a foot of rounded stones each no bigger than a fist.
‘They’ll rattle through these all right,’ says Brennan, picking up a stone and hefting it, then putting it back.
They come to the big double bank – five feet high, six feet six across, with a six-foot ditch on take-off and a four-foot ditch on landing.
‘You’ll need to check him into the bank, give him time to take a full stride on the top. I’ve seen too many horses treat it like a single bank and wind up in the ditch on the far side. The water jump’s like any other, and the single banks are all on and off, though I’ve seen a bold jumper fly a single and get away with it. Not recommended. Watch out for the plain drop – there’s no fence in front of it, only a white pole on the ground to tell you there’s a five-foot drop on the other side.’
There are two thousand or more people in the Punchestown crowd and an army of bookmakers, a third of them from Dublin. John’s is the third race; he watches the first out in the country by the banks and the stone walls. He comes back past the grandstand, a ramshackle affair of concrete steps, no seats, a curved tin roof and a crowded bar at the rear, still a big step up from the carts, carriages and cars that carry the spectators at point-to-points. The three-card-trick men, the trick-of-the-loop men and the thimble-riggers with their vanishing peas are doing good business. Above them the green, white and orange flag of the new Free State flutters bravely in the breeze alongside the flag of the Kildare Hunt, whose meeting this is. In the enclosure are many of the British soldiers who made up a substantial part of the race-going and race-riding crowd all over Ireland, but since the Treaty they are in civilian clothes. There are men in uniform, but these are Irishmen in the new green serge, brown boots, leggings and harp buttons of the Irish Free State’s National Army.
He buys a racecard for the pleasure of seeing his name in print; ‘Mr John Burke’, it says, opposite ‘Hunting Cap’. On the cover, ‘Ladies are requested not to wear native fox furs.’ The bookies have Hunting Cap as second favourite at five to two.
‘Lough Corrib at even money is the one to watch; the bookies have got this right for once. Hunt our boy round on the first circuit, stay out of trouble, and take close order with Lough Corrib three out. He’s in the green and red silks. But you and Hunting Cap will work it out. Races aren’t often won by trainers’ instructions.’
John has a hollow feeling in his stomach as he changes into his racing silks with the other jockeys. They are all amateurs, and he recognizes and says hello to one or two from the point-to-point circuit. No one talks much. In the parade ring he and Paddy Brennan are joined by Charles, who seems to know everyone inside and outside the ring. To John’s surprise and pleasure Cis is with him.
‘Take care,’ she says, crossing herself as she speaks.
John checks the girth and the stirrups, swings up into the saddle and leaves the ring. As he starts to canter down to the start he sees Grania by the rails; she gives him a smile and a wave. Who is she with, John wonders, and then the race blots everything else out of his mind.
It is a small field of only nine horses. The starter has some difficulty getting them into line, and John and Hunting Cap are left two or three lengths behind. They take the first circuit steadily, avoiding trouble on the outside of the field. Hunting Cap is unaffected by the rattle of flying stones as they take the walls and pricks up his ears at the noise of the crowd when they pass the grandstand for the first time. As they go out into the country, John has a double handful and is beginning to enjoy himself. By this stage there are only four in with a chance.