Alfred makes his final move

I cannot bear missing the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe.

By ‘missing’ I mean being at Lonchamp itself, of course; I realise there is full coverage on television but I miss the Bois de Boulogne, the build-up during the morning and, yes, the minuscule but potent thimble of coffee and the cognac chaser as you search in vain for a Paris-Turf newspaper.

My thoughts turn to old Alfred, stalwart of the retired ex-servicemen’s lunch just before Christmas. It usually took place at a hostelry in Netley, not far from the infamous military hospital, which vanished without trace a long time ago.

Alfred never held court, he just approached his nineties with a warmth and equanimity which I admired. The numbers dropped for the obvious reason year on year but he simply chuckled and said he had no intention of going anywhere until a mare won the Grand National. Given that the last of her sex to prevail was Nickel Coin in 1951, I said it meant he’d probably go on for ever. ‘Fine by me,’ he smiled.

He adored France and Paris in particular, opting to stay there when the war ended in 1945. He could ‘reel off’ Arc winners the way people here concentrate on the Derby and he was quite a historian to boot. He eventually returned to England but had no surviving family when his young wife died, something he kept largely to himself, though I like to think we were good friends.

I’m not sure if he’d have heard the recent news about Alfred Dreyfus. It’s difficult if not impossible to see French racing from a caring home lounge so he wouldn’t have seen the meeting at Deauville on July 12. In fact it would have come too soon to react to the announcement that every July 12 will feature a commemorative celebration of ‘the triumph of justice and truth over hatred and antisemitism’ president Macron said.

A lone voice in a Weston-super-Mare care home might have been heard to remark that it’s taken rather a long time for the record to be set straight.

Captain Dreyfus, a Jewish officer, was wrongly accused of treason in 1894 and stripped of his rank. His guilt was vigorously disputed by Zola and Proust but the nation remained divided in its opinion. His statue was moved around Paris from the Tuileries gardens to the other side of the Seine to a site formerly occupied by the Cherche-Midi jail, where Dreyfus was imprisoned following his arrest.

120 years after his name was cleared and a year after he was posthumously promoted to the rank of brigadier general, he can stand easy on the Rue de Harlay on the Ile de la Cite, in front of the cour de cassation, France’s highest civil court.

‘My’ Alfred knew all about the Dreyfus case, of course, and as a flaneur of the old school he’d have known the various places where the bronze statue tried for a fresh start. So would Ernest Hemingway, whose involvement in racing is a most informative part of A Moveable Feast, a late collection of early experiences, together with pithy essays from the Paris days.

Hemingway was too proud to list any significant losers and he is not alone in that. But, as Alfred pointed out, he tired of racing for a while because it was getting in the way of his writing and simply taking up too much time. We learn that he was mainly a jumps man and I liked this: ‘I loved Auteuil but I was getting too involved and  I knew too much about what went on at Enghien and at the flat tracks also.’

‘Hardly anyone remembers that he went bike racing for a while, though he never wrote a book or a short story about it,’ Alfred said. ‘I remember the rue des Italiens that he talks about. It was close to the cycling track and the champion in those days was Gustave Ganay, who died young. I don’t know if the top-class horse race was named after him.’

Many honest punters will go along with Hemingway’s doubts about the life he was leading. ‘I stopped finally because it took too much time. When I stopped racing I was glad but there was an emptiness.’

Alfred has been gone for some time now and I miss him. He was wise without trying to be clever. And he came out with some cute one-liners. ‘I’ve always been Alfred, you know. Let’s be honest, I don’t look or sound like an Alf or an Alfie, do I?’

No indeed. Alfreds tend to be polite and patient to a fault  –  something the brigadier would no doubt agree with.

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