THE RACE, THE GAME AND WHAT COMES AFTER

As the goals rained down on Southampton the other evening there was no great surprise around the ground. After 13 minutes, with Tottenham three-nil up, the manager was bound to be sacked and it was just a question of playing out time. It’s a long way home and I welcomed the warmth of the car. Some Bill Evans  –  My Foolish Heart, perhaps  –  would have helped but my daughter was driving and you can’t have everything.

Nothing dents my love of Christmas and I shall be back on song by the time you read this, though the racing memories are starting to share time with whatever else was going on, and indeed what I was thinking, when the late December highlights loomed.

If I go back as far as 1984 (and we all know I go back a great further than that) I think of Burrough Hill Lad and Combs Ditch landing together over the last in the King George VI Chase at Kempton and David Elsworth suggesting the latter might have prevailed instead of going down by inches. John Francome, always one to defend his colleagues, in this case Colin Brown, said this was not so and Burrough Hill Lad had simply landed with the slightest advantage at the last and maintained it all the way to the line.

Do I remember that conversation more clearly than driving back through central London to Hampstead and the flat I shared in Cricklewood? Maybe. But if ever you wanted to sample London’s twinkling nights at your leisure without some imbecile with his lights full up on your bumper, Boxing Night was the time to do it. ‘Compare and contrast’ with today, as the old exam papers used to say.

Down Piccadilly, left up Charing Cross Road, across the Marylebone Road and all the way up the side of Regents Park to Hampstead and the Horse and Groom, mercifully open with the barman, who’d have done well in a Robert Redford lookalike competition even though he batted for the other side, in excellent form.

I knew little of such grown-up things when Halloween won his second King George in 1954, though I recall well enough my Aunt Em handing bets to Ern, who doubled as a bus inspector in Portswood, Southampton, his regulation mac hanging lower on one side (bets in) than the other (occasional winnings).

From there the investments travelled to Johnny Denton’s office in Belmont Road, almost next door to future film director Ken Russell’s house. With a name like his, Johnny should have been a riverboat gambler falling slowly and fatally in love with Barbara Stanwyck, but he was just a bookie.

One of his clerks sat in the window looking out on the street. She was a blonde with a beehive hair-do and when I looked in one day she winked at me. It was a while ago, of course, more than sixty years though I remember it clearly enough.

The beehive was fashionable in those days and one of the working girls on Derby Road sometimes had a cup of tea with my Aunt Lil before going out. Pins everywhere and bangles. She was nice but it can be a hard old game. ‘Two pounds for the short time’ has lodged in my memory bank. Bit more now, I should think, and an even shorter time. Such is life.

I was allowed sixpence on Halloween and adored Bill Wightman for life afterwards, though if you’d said I’d end up writing his retirement piece in the Life and his obituary in the Post I’d have said you were doolally. (Great word, which my dad may have picked up in the Army. Some of the troops at the Deolali Transit Camp in India went a bit off-kilter through boredom and were said to suffer from the Doolali Tap.) Cholera was rife as well, of course, with quinine one of the antidotes. This is why Schweppes did so well when gin and tonic became a favourite beverage; it was relatively high in quinine.

Do I remember Halloween more vividly than the film Shane? Hard to say, though Shane has the advantage in that I’ve seen it a few times since Aunt Em took me to the long-disappeared Palladium, a big, old-fashioned cinema which formed the backdrop to Ern’s pitch.

Although it’s become common enough to see the lone, silent stranger coming to a town’s rescue in the face of daunting odds, there is rather more to Shane, which I think is the greatest Western ever made.

Shane (Alan Ladd) is looking for a quieter life after a violent past and the possibility seems to exist when he joins the pioneering farming family headed by Van Heflin. But a violent gang, bolstered by gunfighter Jack Palance’s leering, contemptuous presence, is having none of it and forces a memorable showdown.

The film has some unforgettable moments, most notably when Shane dances with Van Heflin’s wife (Jean Arthur) who wonders, briefly, if life might have turned out quite differently for her. For his part, Van Heflin is superb as the family head who will die to save the property and is only subdued in a frightening set-to when Shane uses a gun butt on him.

This is witnessed by Van Heflin’s son Joey, played by Brandon de Wilde, one of the most appealing and natural child actors of the time. ‘Shane, you hit him with your gun, Shane’, which is a step beyond a child’s view of what is fair. He adores Shane nonetheless and follows him to town, even issuing a warning cry during the saloon gunfight.

A stray bullet means that Ladd departs the scene with a wound which may or may not be serious. Joey’s desperate pleas must go unheeded. ‘No, Joey, I gotta be goin’ on,’ Shane says.

Be honest, wouldn’t you like to say that just once in life? I know I would, the only problem being I’m not sure where I’d head for. The memories will have to do.

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