Racing
Rocking horse
Jeffrey Bernard.
Various things like a beautiful and wholesome girl, pressure of work and a visitation damn nigh to death's door — in that order— have kept me away from the racecourSe for the past ten days. So, I've been back on the betting shop scene again and heartily sick I'm getting of that. I work and bet therefore in an area in which quality betting shops are particularly thin on the ground. The shop I use mostly is Fordham's in Gerrard Street which is the one used by the Chinese community thereabouts. It has one saving beauty. All the rubbish talked there about racing is done so in a language that I don't understand a word of. There's nothing more irritating in a shop, when you're trying to sort out a winner or two, than constantly being forced by the volume of speech to overhear codswallop.
I'm sure that the Chinese betting shop walls hear just as much rubbish on the lines of, `I bet the bastard must have pulled the favourite just now,': and/or, `All the people in racing are bleedin' crooks.' But at least I don't have to hear it. As far as the first remark goes it will always be a mystery to me as to how a man in a London betting shop listening to a commentary on a race at York — and a twice relayed commentary at
that — can think he's in any sort of position whatsoever to judge just what the hell has happened 30 seconds ago some 250 miles away. The second remark is beneath contempt and has more to do with just having .
lost a lousy 50p than anything else. Anyway, that's been my most regular punting haunt of late followed by Coral's in Rupert Street market which is where the barrow boys unload chunks of their profits.
The only other place I use is the one and only Fordham's 'underneath Bianchi's in Frith Street. I'm sure I've addressed you on the subject of this establishment before, but now the time has come to urge you to visit the place because there will never be another like it, please God. Picture if you can a half Italian, half Cypriot kin dergartern, in which all the babies need a shave by the 3.30 race, in which they all hold bundles of money, in which they all stand around eating ice cream cones and in which they all burst hysterically into tears when the result of each race is announced.
Over the years, I've gotten slightly weary with women telling me, with what they con sider to be tremendous perception and intelligence, that there's no such thing as a grown up man and that we're all boys pre tending to be men. Well, all those repetitive girls just must have spent an afternoon in the Frith Street branch of Fordham's. The worst loser in the place is an enormously fat Greek Cypriot who really does look like a baby when you watch him waddle to the 'Pay In' counter.
There are quite a lot of very ugly and bad tempered looking babies in this shop as well. You must have seen them sitting upin prams parked outside supermarkets. They usually have a wisp of carrot coloured hair
and even at that age I'll swear that even they
have got a gut feeling that they're quite hideous. The Frith Street version of that one is the man who kicks the skirting board when his horse gets stuffed and who then swears and abuses the — very pleasant in this case — staff. They too double the anger with an honest inner knowledge that they're wrong, wrong. This leads them to chase their losses and so they lose more and howl more. The Italians aren't quite such noticeable babies, probably I suspect, because I expect all Italians to be babies from Caruso to Mussolini and back to Soho. They're just noisy, harmless babies and they stop crying as soon as an ice cream is popped into their mouths. Then they gurgle quite contentedly until the last race. Anyway, as I say, I've had ten days of this nonsense and last Monday I
awoke with a thought that's -hardly ever struck me before. Once or twice maybe. I
thought, 'I'll never hack a horse again.'
Later that morning I had to telephone John Santer at the Racing Information Bureau about something pretty trivial and in the course of our conversation, I said, 'Oh, by the way John. I've decided never to have a bet again.' There was a lengthy pause and then he said, `Good. I hope you can manage to get -through today.' My God, there's cynicism.
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