Low life
Whose blood is it anyway?
Jeffrey Bernard
But, as I say, the blood transfusions were indeed a bloody bore. Each bag took between seven and eight hours to go through — usually each bag goes through in three hours. Unfortunately, I have small, weak-walled veins so I am becalmed for an age by drips. It is very natural that the recipients of organs should feel beholden to dead donors, and they often try and suc- ceed in contacting those who were close to the donor to express their gratitude, but blood being a penny a pint, so to speak, that doesn't apply to people who receive blood transfusions. It is not known to anyway.
But I lay there wondering, and still do occasionally, as to whose blood is creeping through the nooks and crannies of these narrow veins. A housewife's? A nun's? A murderer's? I wonder. I don't feel a lot stronger for it but I should. It is no longer allowed but the French sometimes changed every drop of blood in a racehorse's body, putting it away in a fridge for a fortnight or so while it pumped substitute blood around its system. Meanwhile, the original stuff in the fridge was sort of recharging itself and building up the oxygen in it. Just before the big race day, the original blood would be replaced and theoretically the horse would win doing handstands.
That was common knowledge in Chantil- ly, and I was unsportingly pleased to get 8- 1 on Crow when he won over here and was trained by that Egyptian-born monkey, Maurice Zilber. I think that was the Eclipse stakes at Sandown Park, but I can't remember or reach my record books on the shelves in this bloody wheelchair. What I do remember was tipping Crow, and, would you believe it, a female reader wrote to thank me and sent me the extraordinary present of a set of pure cotton linen and a couple of bath towels. That was 20 odd years ago and what on earth could I have written or in what way could I have written anything that would have led her to believe that my sheets needed changing? It was admittedly an anonymous note and present so she might have spent a night in my chambers, but I doubt it.
Anyway, it all reminds me of Chantilly and how I loved going there and staying in the Hotel du Château. Bill Pyers, the jock- ey who rode the greatest of all Derby win- ners, Sea Bird II, served drinks there for a while out of the sheer boredom you would expect an Aussie living there without a word of French would have. They used to say that the trainers there were so bent and `pulled' horses so often that the first bit of French a visiting foreign jockey would learn as he was being put up on a non-trier horse was, Pas aujourd' hui.'
I would love to go back to Chantilly but it would be impossible without a wheelchair-pusher. I still think it makes Newmarket look like cold mutton. The last time I was there was just before Criquette Head sent Ravinella over here to win the 1,000 Guineas. She insisted on taking me to lunch. She is an excellent trainer too, and I drank her health in the wretched Midland Hotel in Manchester the Sunday she won the Arc de Triomphe with Three Troikas. But the days of Maurice Zilber and his ilk were wondrous in their way. He and the ex- Argentinian trainer, Angel Penna, had all the icing and cream of the Chantilly cake. At first glance, Zilber's stable staff looked as if he had hand picked them from the front row of the Folies Bergere. Most sta- ble lads in Chantilly are fairly objectionable Algerian cowboys who are pretty useless compared to English and Irish lads. They just don't ride as well or care as much. Angel — dreadful misnomer — had a house as heavily steel-shuttered as Fort Knox but then they did train those two utterly brilliant fillies, Allez France and Dahlia, which must have swollen their pri- vate safes. Allez France certainly did won- ders for Angel's head, You don't need to have French, flash, chic to train winners but it is lovely to behold.
When I first set foot on Criquette Head's establishment I commented do the château at the edd of yards of horse boxes and said it looked great. She laughed, agreed, but said that it was the head lad's house. On an odd note, there are still men there with English names like Robinson who can barely speak a word of English whose fore- bears came to Chantilly at the turn of the century when the French wanted the best for their horses. God knows why they stayed. Perhaps they ran out of sandwiches.
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