Ashes In the Wind Read online

  Charles and Cis find him, more dead than alive, dumped on the front steps of Burke’s Fort the next morning. He is still unconscious, his face bloody and bruised, his jaw and nose broken, both eyes completely closed, one leg at an impossible angle. The ambulance is called and takes him straight to hospital in Dublin.

  For five weeks John lies in a coma. He wakes up to find Cis beside his bed.

  ‘I thought you were gone, gone beyond my prayers and the Poor Clares. Thanks be to God you’re back.’

  John, through a splitting headache, says only one word. ‘Grania.’

  ‘She’s married, she’s Mrs McCann now, and that’s for the best. They burned the Folly the day you were dumped on our doorstep; Mannion has said Burke’s Fort will go the same way if you come back to Queen’s County.’

  John turns his battered face into the pillow.

  II

  England and Ireland

  1924–1936

  18

  A WEEK LATER John is moved to a convalescent home, a handsome Italianate villa in Howth with a view of the Irish Sea. There are only twenty-four patients; one other civilian, a lawyer injured when the Four Courts were blown up, the rest British Army soldiers wounded during the War of Independence. These are men who have lost legs, whose arms have been amputated at the elbow or shoulder, one man blinded, several with bad burns. The home is kept going by a charitable trust set up by public subscription just after the Great War. Charles Burke pulled some strings.

  ‘He’s a war casualty,’ Charles argued without going into unnecessary detail. ‘His father was a major in the Royal Irish Dragoons. Won the MC, killed in 1916 on the Somme.’

  It is the regimental connection that clinches John’s place. Questioned by the other patients about his injuries, he gives non-committal replies. By now his face has recovered its normal shape; there has been no permanent damage to his eyes. His broken nose and jaw have healed, although his nose has set at a crooked angle.

  ‘You look like a boxer,’ says one of the nurses, who has taken a fancy to him. ‘Not a very successful one, I must say.’

  His right leg is the problem, broken at the ankle and in two more places below the knee. When finally the plaster comes off, John is shocked at the shrunken, bleached, scarred leg that emerges. It throbs continuously, and he cannot put any weight on it for more than a few seconds.

  ‘Will it ever come good?’ he asks.

  ‘Only if you do the exercises. Some of the men here would be glad of a leg like that,’ says an unsympathetic doctor.

  John, chastened, takes his regime seriously. He abandons his crutches, swims every day in the small sea-water pool, and lifts weights attached to his ankle every morning and evening to build up his muscles.

  He has too much time to think. Images of his night with Grania, her body in the lamplight, her last kiss as she left in the morning, the meeting with Mannion at Burke’s Fort, the bruise on her cheek, her last words to him as she left, ‘It’s what will happen,’ shuttle through his brain in an agonizing slideshow. Thoughts of Grania with Eamonn are impossible to banish. He plans a trip to Maryborough and then realizes he has no idea what to say or do if he meets her again. Is she still pregnant? Could that child ever be mine? He torments himself with unanswered, unanswerable questions until he thinks he will go mad.

  Cis comes to see him and is a comfort, although he cannot share her faith that everything is God’s will and must be borne. She prays for him, and smiles when he says he is a lost cause. She gives him a little book of prayers, in the front of which she has written, ‘To John from Cis Burke, in the hope that he will come to God through all his troubles’. Although he cannot pray any more – he had prayed for Eileen’s life, and was unanswered – one of Cis’s prayers, ‘Mother of God, Star of the Sea, Home of the Wanderer, Pray for me,’ sticks in his mind, and he says this in spite of himself.

  When his leg is healed he takes long walks along the sea, often pushing a captain from the Lancashire Fusiliers who has lost both legs above the knee.

  ‘I survived three years on the Western Front, and then get blown up when they attacked our armoured car in Leeson Street. I hate this country, hate the bloody Irish. Now they’ve finished killing us they’ve started on each other.’

  John doesn’t argue, and it is true that his own feelings about his country and those he thought of as his countrymen have changed. They killed my mother, burned my house down and one of them nearly killed me. I might as well have been English, or a staunch Unionist, a Black and Tan even, for all the good feeling Irish, being Irish, has done me.

  Charles visits him ten days before he is due to be discharged.

  ‘I’ve put a thousand pounds in your account in the Bank of Ireland to tide you over.’ As John protests, he says, ‘It’s a loan until you get compensation for Derriquin. But you can’t come back to the Fort, even Cis agrees that. There’s no law or police to protect the likes of us against the Mannions who control the new Ireland. You could go back to Trinity, I suppose, though that’d be risky. The Royal Irish Dragoons would have you if they’ve got any room in the peacetime army.’

  ‘I’m done with Trinity, and I doubt the army’s for me.’

  ‘Fair enough. I could speak to Tom O’Brien in Lambourn. He’s from Queen’s County – Laois we have to call it now – a good trainer of jumpers. He’d give you a job in his yard. It’d be a place to go, and you need to get out of Ireland for a while.’

  Although John still thinks about going to find Grania, somehow taking her away from Eamonn McCann, he knows he needs a cure. He thanks Charles and is cut short.

  ‘Listen, there’s a lot of self-preservation in this – if I was a braver man I’d say to hell with all of them, and get Mannion prosecuted for attempted murder. Lambourn solves my problems as well as yours. I’ll tell O’Brien to expect you next week. We’ll send on a trunk with your stuff.’

  ‘Would young Charlie like my Morris Oxford?’

  ‘Good idea. Teach him car mechanics the hard way.’

  Looking out from the back of the steamer to the Liverpool ferry as it steams out of Dun Laoghaire, which used to be Kingstown, John thinks about what he is leaving behind. Eileen, Josephine, Charles, Cis, Grania. He is leaving behind these people, County Kerry, Ireland, and his identity with them. ‘I’m a Kerry man’ becomes ‘We used to live in County Kerry’, and when he arrives in Lambourn he has to add, ‘It’s in the South-West of Ireland.’

  Tom O’Brien’s yard is bustling, a courtyard of forty boxes, all full, with the trainer’s house in one corner. Tom is small, wiry, bow-legged, a man of few words.

  ‘Charles told me about you,’ he says. ‘You’ll do your two here, and if you’re any good we’ll get you the odd ride. I’m not paying you, so you can ride as a gentleman. Start off in the dormitory with the other lads. Is your leg better? Charles said it was a nasty fall.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ says John, and moves into the dormitory, which he shares with the other lads, lads ranging from sixteen to fifty. The long room is spartan, twelve narrow beds, tall army surplus lockers, a bathroom and lavatory at each end. The room smells of cigarettes and sweat; there is a shout of protest when John opens the window above his bed.

  ‘Shut the bloody window for Christ’s sake, you’ll blow out what little heat we’ve got,’ and it is true that the solitary black stove in the middle of the room warms only the six beds closest to it.

  The work is hard, much harder than at Burke’s Fort. Morning stables start sharp at six in the summer, seven when it gets dark; the first lot of fifteen horses and riders walk round in the yard with Tom O’Brien in the middle giving instructions.

  ‘Jimmy, take Duchess in a steady canter alongside The Trader. George, yours needs a gallop; keep him back to the end and give him a good workout. John, Blaeberry’s running on Saturday, she just needs to stretch her legs...’

  And the first lot trots through the village and up onto the downs, where Tom is waiting on his hack to watch them, two by two,
come up the mile of downland turf that they use every day. Then back to the yard, unsaddle, walk round to cool down, rug up and into the loose-box to fresh water and the first feed of rolled oats and a net of hay. Then the same again with the second lot at eight. At ten, a giant breakfast cooked by Tom’s wife Maeve, eggs, bacon, fried bread, tea, bread, butter and jam that vanishes as quickly as it is produced. Then mucking out, dung and straw delivered in a steaming heap onto the wagon in the middle of the yard, fresh straw once a week in every box. Then cleaning the tack, a job John likes for the smell of the leather and the saddle soap and the oil; the webbing girths, damp with sweat, are washed and dried every day.

  Tom is strict. At the end of every morning, each horse and loose-box is checked with the lad standing by. Tom has a keen eye for an oversight; if he picks up a hoof it is sure to be the one that hasn’t been cleaned out. If he runs his hand down a foreleg and finds some unreported heat, the tongue-lashing that follows is to be avoided. John is not exempt; a sweat-stain still on one of his horse’s quarters gets him his first dressing-down, for which he is ribbed at breakfast. And when his second horse, startled by a dog, dumps him on his back and canters away, luckily coming to no harm, he is ribbed again. John feels chastened; he is also beginning to feel part of the group.

  19

  THERE ARE A dozen jumping yards like Tom O’Brien’s in Lambourn, all competing at the racecourse and for good horses, generous owners and competent jockeys. At the same time, while there are some long-running feuds between a few trainers, there is a camaraderie bred out of the danger and the excitement of steeplechasing and hurdling. When a Lambourn trainer wins a Gold Cup or a Grand National, the whole village, not just the winning yard, celebrates putting one over the Northern trainers or the Irish.

  There are eight pubs where most of the lads’ meagre wages go every Saturday night. Tom O’Brien’s lads like The Bell; it’s a hundred yards away, which makes walking home easier, and it’s one of only three pubs in Lambourn that stock Guinness. It’s in The Bell that the lads swap yard gossip and try to extract reliable information about other yards and other horses without parting with too much in exchange. Betting coups are planned there, and sometimes brought off. The small bets placed by O’Brien’s lads aren’t enough to move the market or produce spectacular returns, so elaborate doubles, trebles and Yankees are the preferred roads to fortune. By Tuesday or Wednesday most of the stable pockets are empty.

  John fits easily into this new world of riding two, mucking out, cleaning tack, the pub and bed by ten o’clock. He is a good horseman and soon is given horses that need sympathetic handling. Early on he is told to ride Blaeberry, an unraced and difficult five-year-old mare, partly to test him, partly because three experienced lads have already tried and failed to handle her. No one else is eager to take her on. When she whips round at the bottom of the gallops and puts John on the floor, there is an ironic cheer. But he manages to hold on to the reins, remounts, gives her two sharp cracks with his whip behind the saddle and sits tight through the three or four outraged bucks that follow. He never hits her again. She goes sweetly up the gallops at a steady canter, her stride lengthening all the way, holding her own with the good gelding alongside her.

  ‘She’ll be a racehorse yet,’ says Tom as they hack back to the yard. And when she goes on to win her second bumper with John up, and subsequently scores in two maiden hurdles ridden by the O’Brien stable jockey, John’s reputation is established.

  As a horseman, but not as a race rider. John has real difficulty doing less than eleven stone seven pounds, and he still can’t ride a strong finish. He gets a dozen rides in his first year in amateur steeplechases, and wins a couple, is placed in three and gets round safely every time. It is the same pattern in the following two years. His best result is a respectable fourth in the Foxhunters at Aintree.

  After a year in the dormitory, John rents a former keeper’s cottage on an estate just outside Lambourn. A two up, two down, running water heated by an explosive gas geyser that singes John’s hair on several occasions, it has no electricity but a long view over the Berkshire downs. From time to time he shares the cottage with another amateur from the O’Brien yard, but they come and go. Most of the time he is on his own. One of the owners sells him a cocker spaniel bitch, Bella, that keeps him company. Bella goes everywhere with John, except to the races, and comes to an early understanding with Tom’s Jack Russells in the yard office that they are the top dogs.

  This combination of hard physical activity and a solitary life in the evenings, broken only by a weekly visit to The Bell on Saturday night, suits John well. He is a man in exile; the few friends he has are left behind in Ireland. He tries hard to forget Grania, but she appears too often in tortured dreams, sometimes as a succubus, sometimes in the arms of the Maryborough lawyer. He is unable to imagine or dream of the child.

  Why, he asks himself, didn’t she talk to me before Mannion? Just as he had so often relived and altered the kidnapping of Eileen, so his night visit to Mannion’s farm becomes a meeting with Grania at the Trafalgar Folly, an elopement to England, marriage, until these imaginings dissolve into the harsh memory of the attack in the farmyard and the blackout from which he often wishes he had never emerged. Sometimes, when he is pushing down fresh hay from the loft into the basket below, the memory of that first embrace with Grania comes to him so strongly that he has to lean against the wall, his head against his arms, his body shaking.

  Encounters with girls are few and far between. His mother’s sister Agnes had married a successful barrister with a house in London and Dorset. She makes valiant efforts to introduce John to eligible young women, with little success. He goes to a few coming-out dances in London, but white ties, tails and debutantes are not for him. When he fails to write effusive bread-and-butter letters, the invitations peter out.

  He is still in occasional contact with Charles and Cis. He gets the first tranche of the Derriquin compensation, three thousand pounds, and uses some of this to buy a couple of horses from Charles that he brings over and puts into training with Tom O’Brien. One of these, a five-year-old gelding, is by The Elector, and John wins two good races with him before selling him on at a decent profit. And he buys a car, an Alvis, that is much admired by the other lads in the yard.

  He remains alone and apart, still thinking from time to time about Grania, still reliving his encounter with Mannion in the dining room at Burke’s Fort. And his leg continues to hurt in cold weather.

  After he has been in the yard four years, Tom calls John into the office, an untidy room cluttered with terriers, form books, old copies of the Sporting Life, photographs of past triumphs and a stack of bills and letters. Only the owners’ racing silks are hung up in anything resembling order in a long cupboard leading off the room.

  ‘I’d like you to be my assistant trainer,’ says Tom. ‘We’re up to sixty horses now, and I’m run off my feet. Whenever we have runners at different meetings on the same day I have to choose. And any owner that gets George feels short-changed.’

  George is the travelling head lad, drives one of the horseboxes and has been with Tom for twenty years.

  ‘How will George take it?’

  ‘He’ll be fine. He knows what he can and can’t do. He’d run a mile from the paperwork.’

  He points to the mess on his desk.

  ‘You can see we need to sort ourselves out. And you’re good with the owners. Five hundred a year – you’ll no longer be an amateur rider.’

  John asks for a day to think it over and then accepts.

  His days in the new job are just as long, but he no longer rides out and does his two. Instead, he takes out the first and third lots to the gallops and spends the rest of the morning sorting through letters and bills. He and Tom spend an hour every afternoon going through the available races over the following three months, planning their campaigns horse by horse.

  The yard’s strike rate improves when John suggests that the stable jockey, who is spe
nding too much time in The Bell and is having difficulty doing the weight, is replaced.

  ‘Danny’s lost his nerve. He’s drinking too much, and it’s only a matter of time before he starts betting against himself,’ says John. ‘We could get Michael Molloy over from Ireland, I reckon, see if he suits us. He can do ten seven if he has to, powerful in a finish. He’s had twenty winners in Ireland so far this season, and he’s not often out of the frame when he’s on a decent horse. Danny can drive one of the horseboxes – provided he gives up the drink.’

  ‘Will Molloy come?’

  He does come, he does suit, and rides forty winners in his first season. And he rides Dunkerron, the stable’s first winner at Cheltenham, for Billy Vincent, O’Brien’s biggest owner, who immediately sends him six more horses.

  ‘We shouldn’t have more than sixty altogether,’ says John. ‘Or at least not for long. Let’s cull the weak performers, and send them back to point-to-pointing or hunting where they belong. We’ll be doing our owners a favour.’

  20

  ‘THIS IS MRS Vincent. She’d like us to find her a chaser.’

  John shakes hands with Mrs Vincent; she is fair-haired, in her mid-thirties, John guesses.

  ‘It’s my birthday present from Billy. All you’ve got to do is find me one as good as Dunkerron,’ says Mrs Vincent, smiling.

  ‘Do you think we should try the Newmarket sales?’ says Tom.

  ‘Only if we want a hurdler. Up there they’ve all got flat-racing pedigrees and prices to match. If we want a staying jumper, one that will get three miles, Ireland’s a better bet. I’ll ask my uncle, he bought me a couple of decent horses last year. He’ll have some suggestions. I need some idea about price.’