Racing
Patient punter
Jeffrey Bernard
I shall never go racing again on a Bank Holiday and don't you. Kempton Park on Boxing Day was awful and that was in spite of two really great races. Traditionally, one takes one's hangover to Kempton after Christmas to give it an airing, but when 50,000 or so like-minded people are at it, then a day at the races becomes a gigantic and uncomfortable scrum.
British Rail, as only they can do it, started the day off in lunatic style, They'd put on what they laughingly called a 'special' to Kempton and they said it would leave from platform 16. A few hundred binoculared fanatics gathered at the end of that platform and waited patiently for twenty minutes and then they announced that the 'special' would leave from platform 5 after all. We charged the length of Waterloo and stood champing at that platform for ten minutes until another announcement told us to go back to platform 16. The return charge was fairly spectacular. I maimed at least two children and one woman with my briefcase and saw one red setter crumple from a blow on the head from a pair of race glasses. But eventually we got on our 'special' and discovered what was so special about it. It kept stopping. Once on the racecourse I realised that the outing was a ghastly mistake. Only at Wembley have I seen so many dreadful people loafing with intent. You could hardly seea horsefor thecrowdand getting a drink in any of the bars was fifteen minutes hard graft.
That horse-racing is largely a matter of opinion was nicely proved in and after the first race. I had a fancy for Bob Turnell's King Neptune and banged a fiver on its nose. The horse made several mistakes, but managed to get second, beaten by a couple of lengths. As soon as they passed the post my
man on the rails said, thought like you, Jeff, and put £40 on the bleedin' animal. It wasn't trying a yard, was it ? A diabolical liberty, that's what it was.' He continued his slander and I walked back to the grandstand past two men who were discussing the same horse. 'That Andy Turnell,' one of them was saying. 'He's bloody brilliant. No other jockey would have got within twenty lengths of the winner.' I have to subscribe to the latter view and a lack of moral fibre it was that prevented me from telling my bookmaker that he was talking rubbish. The trouble is, when a bookmaker gives you the best available price or a point over the odds, then you need to keep him sweet. What made him think that the Turnell combination wasn't interested in winning the race is beyond me.
Just before the big race of the day, the King George VI, I realised it was hopeless to try and see the horses in the paddock so
watched and listened on a television set in the trainers' and owners' bar. Would to God I wasn't so easily led. I'd fancied Royal Marshal [I all the way from London and then I allowed Dick Pitman's commentary to put me off. He went on about what a nasty, mean, scraggy individual that horse was and put me right off. My fault, not his. What was so galling though was to hear, after Royal Marshal II had won at 16-1, the trainer say the horse is always at his best when he looks like that. I took a really close look at him outside the weighing room when he was being unsaddled and I must say the beast looked as though it had just done two years' solitary in Parkhurst.
Before that race, by the way, Dramatist won an epic hurdle from Night Nurse and Bird's Nest and these green eyes thought that Bird's Nest finished best of all. It was pleasing to hear from Richard Baerlein, as he handed me a glass of revolting racecourse special medium sherry, that he'd napped the winner in the Guardian. I was to remember Mr Baerlein a week later. Meanwhile I ended the day at Kempton on a classic note. I like to lose my money scientifically but the holiday spirit put me in the mood for hunches and when I met a bookmaker in the bar just before the last who asked me if I'd lay him Brief Chance I told him yes. The horse hacked up at 9-2 and it must have been the sherry that made me lay him. A couple of points over 9-2 and there would have been an embarrassing scene with me welshing or walking back to London.
Before I staggered off the course, I mentioned to Mr Baerlein that Roger Mortimer had been waxing eloquently to me a couple of weeks back about Fred Rimell's horse Hiram Maxim. Richard said he wasn't sure whether the horse had turned into a pig or whether he'd temporarily lost his form. But the horse stayed fixed in my mind for the next few days. And what a next few days. They ended up with my seeing the New Year in in a ward of the Royal Free Hospital where they told me I might have to be put down. Anyway, between comas and cold, hardboi led eggs, someone shoved a Guardian under my nose and I saw that not only was Hiram Maxim running, but that Richard Baerlein had napped it. His napping it stirred some semblance of confidence in me and I screamed for the telephone trolley to be wheeled to my bedside. Phone calls to Soho were made and Hiram Maxim was backed along with The Dealer and The Bo-Weevil. Hiram Maxim won at 9-1, The Dealer at 2-1 and The Bo-Weevil at 8-11. The night nurse told me I was looking in
tremendously good nick when she came on duty later. I'm wondering whether it wouldn't be a good idea to give punting patients in hospitals false results even if they lose and then tell them the truth later when they've recovered. Of course, actual winners are the best tonic and it's terribly difficult to take doctors seriously when you're lying there knowing that you're going to collect when you get out. What do you think was whispered into Lazarus's ear ?
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