car which had crashed, I swung my ‘chaser round and set off in pursuit.
It was an unequal contest: an ageing jumper against a hot-blooded sprinter. But my anxiety was spur enough for my mount. He was infected by it and aroused, and achieved a pace that was madness on that sort of surface.
The two-year-old, sensing us behind him, could have taken up the challenge and raced harder, but in fact he seemed to be reassured, not galvanised by the approach of another horse, and although he showed no sign of stopping he allowed me gradually to move alongside.
I came up on his outside, with him on my left. He had worn no headcollar in the stable and although I had brought a halter it would have taken a circus stunt man to put it on at such a gallop, let alone an unfit ex-jockey with three fused vertebrae and a shoulder which came apart with one good tug.
We were nearly back to the fork in the village. Straight ahead lay a major roundabout with crossing traffic, and the thought of causing a second accident was too appalling. Whatever the risk to the two-year-old, he had simply got to be directed into the village.
I squeezed my ‘chaser to the left until my leg was brushing the younger horse’s straining side, and I kicked my toe gently into his ribs. I did it three or four times to give him the message, and then when we came to the fork kicked him most insistently and pulled my own mount quite sharply onto him, leaning to the left.
The two-year-old veered into the fork without losing his balance and as positively as if he had been ridden. He fled ahead again into the village, no doubt because once off the main road I had instinctively slowed down. One couldn’t take the narrow bends flat out.
The two-year-old discovered it the hard way. He skidded round the corner to the green, fought to keep his feet under him, struck sparks from his scrabbling shoes, tripped over the six inch high edge of the turf, and fell sprawling in a flurry of legs. Dismounting and grabbing the ‘chaser’s reins I ran towards the prostrate heap. My knees felt wobbly. He couldn’t, I prayed, have torn a tendon here on the soft green grass, with so much agonising danger all behind him.
He couldn’t.
He hadn’t. He was winded. He lay for a while with his sides heaving, and then he stood up.
I had put the halter on him while he was down, and now led him and the ‘chaser, one in each hand, along the lane to the yard. Both of them steamed with sweat and blew down their nostrils; and the hack having been bridled dropped foamy saliva from his mouth; but neither of them walked lame.
The moonlight was calming, quiet and cool. In the yard I hitched the ‘chaser to a railing and led the two-year-old back to his box, and realised there for the first time that he was no longer wearing his rug. Somewhere on his escapade he had rid himself of it. I fetched another and buckled it on. By rights I should have walked him round for another half hour to cool him down, but I hadn’t time. I went out, shut his door, and slammed home the bolt, and simply could not understand how I could have left it undone.
I backed the car out of the garage and drove through the village and down the main road. There was a fair crowd now at the scene of the crash, and people waving torches to direct the traffic. When I pulled on to the grass and stopped one of the self-elected traffic directors told me to drive on, there were enough onlookers already. I told him I lived nearby and perhaps could help, and left him to move along the next fellow.
Across in the north-bound lane also the traffic was on the move, as the wreckage was all on the near side. With something like dread I crossed over and joined the group at the heart of things. Car headlights threw them into sharp relief, bright on one side, dark on the other. All men, all on their feet. And one girl.
It was her car that was most smashed. One side of it seemed to have hit the metal post of the advance signpost to the village and the backside of it had been rammed by a dark green Rover which stood askew