Holly crowns a memorable day

Ask me about Christmas and I come up with three or four vivid memories  –  not bad when you consider Halloween’s second triumph in the King George VI Chase came 71 years ago.

My Aunt Em ferried the bets to Ern, the bookies’ runner who doubled as a bus inspector. Johnny Denton should have been a riverboat gambler with a name like that but he was the bookie on Belmont Road, Southampton a few doors away from film director Ken Russell’s house when Ken was a lad.

Shane was showing at the Palladium and Aunt Em said it would be quiet just before Christmas. I didn’t have the heart to tell her I’d already seen it, in fact I never have the heart for anything like that but I didn’t mind seeing it again and still don’t. ‘No, Joey, I gotta be goin’ on,’ is something I’ve been wanting to say all my life but I’ve never sorted out a saloon bar full of vengeful badhats. Obviously I’ve known a few of those and plenty of saloons but never both at the same time.

There was a Christmas around that time when my working-class parents bought a number of up-to-the-minute toys for me. Within half an hour I asked my dad to play rummy and I can see now how disappointed they must have been, although I’d unwittingly marked their card. No one ever asks me any ‘technical’ questions  –  you know, structures, nuts, bolts etc  –  because they understand my embarrassment, though I did once change a tyre on the way to Sir Mark Prescott’s. I made a darned good job of it, too, and my worries all the way up the M4 about it falling off were quite unfounded.

I write too much about the past, I know, but the fact is that I’m adrift in a world where the latest happenings in Love Island matter more to most people than the fate which befalls King Lear, always assuming they’ve ever heard of him. Where events across the pond are concerned, the only point I’d make about an unspeakable narcissist is that he appears to ‘reach’ millions of supporters whose social equivalents well over a hundred years ago lined the docks and roared their approval of Dickens’ works, even demanding the next one, when he paid a brief visit.

What I’m getting around to saying is that I find it difficult to write for a modern audience. When I think of Christmases past, I’m straight into Bill O’Gorman and his daughter Emma winning with African Chimes on a bitterly cold day at Lingfield. The AW was still something of a novelty then but so many years have gone by that many people are reluctant to believe that there were hurdles races for a while until the number of accidents led to their demise.

It was around that time that spread betting became the latest ‘big thing’ and I well remember from my days as Martin Pipe’s ‘ghost’ the morning he kept a straight face and said he didn’t ‘understand’ it. Well, I’m not quite as green as I’m cabbage looking, as my mother would have said. Martin had Richard Dunwoody as stable jockey at the time and, if we take buying or selling distances as an example, he could have run riot. But before long betting on the exchanges took over and there would be little point in writing about spread betting now.

Does the King George mean a great deal to me? Yes, sort of, but the 1984 race is likely to linger in my memory for much longer than anything that happens this year. (I might have made a point about the contrasting price of the main racing paper at this point but I’ll let it go.)

I’ve known Colin Brown for 42 years now, right from the day John Francome and Burrough Hill Lad inched out Combs Ditch in a riveting finish to the big race, right up to September this year, when Colin again hosted the Brighton meeting where I sponsor my race of 30 years’ standing. He is simply a great bloke, no side to him at all, and no bitterness about his own role in the early Desert Orchid days forgotten by many.

Everything about that 1984 day was special. The west country meetings were snowed or frosted off when I drove up from Cornwall but Kempton survived. And afterwards, with darkness descending, you’ve never seen London quite like it  –  the golden lights in Earl’s Court, the dead easy Boxing Night drive across town to Hampstead, the steep hill up to the Holly Bush, where I like to think Kingsley Amis wrote much of Lucky Jim.

You were spoilt for choice in Hampstead in those days, the Horse & Groom (long gone) with its magnificent Young’s Special or the Flask (still there) on Flask Walk. Al Alvarez, poet, philosopher and poker player, as well as a regular broadcaster on BBC Rdio 4, once told me he’d bought his place for £45,000. ‘Yes, I made my move when Cromwell let the Jews back in!’ he smiled.

It was all quite wonderful, a Christmas leaning towards the old days, which is where I belong. Just lately I’ve come to question the raison d’etre of my own material. To take a random example, and going back to the abandoned meetings, one of them was Wincanton.

I’d have been sorely tempted to mention Tom Fort’s splendid book about the A303, which includes plenty on the subject of Stonehenge as well as places where he relaxed after a day’s cycling or walking. Ilchester and its little bridge are particular favourites, as well as the pub where he sank a few pints of excellent Great Bustard bitter, which is brewed by Stonehenge Ales and is just short of 4.8% ABV.

You may think the Great Bustard is a bit dim because she lays her eggs on the vast open spaces around Stonehenge and therefore loses about eighty per cent of them to foxes. She’d probably tell you off, asking where else she could possibly go  –  on top of the stones, perhaps?  –  whilst also wondering when was the last time you had a bitter named after you…..

Anyway, have a great month, which I’m trying hard not to regard as the December of life. And with Christmas in mind, if you have a friend whose principal interest is racing, you might mention recent Booker Prize winner David Szalay, whose previous book Spring has a detailed account of an attempted coup via Fakenham and Fontwell.

Ian Carnaby’s books are available to buy on our website by clicking here