Low life
Reformed character
Jeffrey Bernard
Itook my 15-year-old daughter Isabel to Newbury races last Saturday and I behaved so well that the memory of it has left me stunned. Usually I go straight to the Members' bar and get bogged down in there for the afternoon with various nut- cases, returning home physically, financial- ly and mentally damaged to stay in bed crying all day on Sunday. (Please God, let me back just one more winner and I promise I'll never have a bet again.) But with the memory of having actually lost her at Ascot two years ago — a friend found her and took her home to her mother and what with her being a little woman now and my new friend, I thought I would try and show her that I am not entirely mad. We had lunch and afternoon tea and that's a double I haven't had up for 20 years. I did not get drunk and I had just one bet on a 6-1 winner, Leading Star, split the winnings with her and very firmly decided to call it a day. On the train home she told me I'd got nine out of ton and had lost only one house point for smoking too much. Anyway, she is going to leave school next year since there is little point in staying on, because she doesn't want to read Jane Austen in Oxford or get a job with the Arts Council, and I was scouting around the trainers I know to see if I could get her a job in a racing yard, which is what she would dearly like to do. The trick here is to find a trainer who employs some girls as well as the obligatory dwarf psychopaths from Glasgow and Manchester. As some know-all like Lord Chesterfield once said, `Keep yourself in the best company and your horses in the worst.' It may still apply but I do know some very decent trainers under whose wings she could learn. But what amazes me is that she isn't frightened of horses and jumps them. They terrify me even from the safe distance of a betting shop but I suppose that's because they eat money as well as corn. But the silly kick I got out of the day was the fact that she is so impressed that I know so many people, from tic-tac men to the odd steward or two. To have possibly known, say, Albert Ein- stein is nothing to a child, but to be able to pass the time of day with Lester Piggott and Steve Cauthen is very serious stuff. So now I've got someone who is actually proud of me and it is an entirely new experience which I fear might drive me to the exhausting exercise of turning over new leaves. Lunch and tea. The mind boggles. She could drive me to secret drinking and all-night poker schools. And now we have arranged that I take her to Newmarket next month to see the Champion Stakes which will be one hell of a contest. She will be duly impressed by the hospitality I get dealt out to me at Newmarket and I, poor mug, will spend all day fending off the glasses of champagne which assault me there. Maybe I should teach her the old adage of if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. She did join me once a couple of years ago at Brighton races when the top brass of the Daily Mirror who were having a day out fed her some champagne by the paddock. I gave her a lager on the train home for fear the bubbly would cause severe dehydration and when she did eventually get home her mother tells me that she and her school- chum next door plundered no less than six pints of cider they found in the cellar. They were in bed as sick as dogs for two days and now claim it was a salutary experience. Salutary my foot. It will be forgotten soon. I was sick when I had my first glass ever of wine at the age of 13 and I can remember, as I pressed my sweating brow against the cool of the lavatory bowl, telling my mother I would never ever touch the stuff again. And now here we are with the matchstick legs involuntarily twitching, hands trembling, eyes looking like burst tomatoes and missing the glass with the soda syphon and almost suicidally squirting the electric typewriter with it. But at least I don't say I won't do it again. In fact, now that I've just about got through this morn- ing, I can't wait for tomorrow morning. Isabel is right about smoking though and I'm afraid my headquarters at home smell like Liverpool Street Station. She is com- ing over next Sunday for lunch and tea and I am to show her a video of Poltergeist 'twixt munching in the kitchen. She wants to see Poltergeist because she likes being frightened. Seeing a buff envelope I should have thought much simpler. Also we will see the McGuigan fight on the box. Oh, I am so glad she doesn't want to be Claire Tomalin or Charles Osborne when she grows up.
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