TOM PEARCE, TOM PEARCE, LEND ME YOUR GREY MARE…

On and on he gallops in the fading Chepstow light.

He is called Lightonthewing but reminds me of Jim’s Tavern at Plumpton all those years ago in a race broadcast, for some long-forgotten reason, on Southern Television in midweek. Plumpton looked bigger, wider in those days and it seemed a long way home to a 13-year-old lad desperately wanting him to hold on.

So, about 63 years ago, with no financial investment and no family involvement, a tiny seed opens the door to an army of front-runners from Newbury and Newmarket, from Aintree and Ascot, all trying to cling on. No family involvement now, needless to say, but enough investments to launch a small  yet highly progressive company or a late-night-piano bar.

Who wants to live without risk? Well, plenty of people but we drift into old age and the familiar arguments and discussions with non-gamblers become tired and predictable. He who buys a lottery ticket buys a dream which lasts him several hours. Not only that, but the man who buries his single talent in the ground for fear of losing it is strongly criticised by the most authoritative figure in the Bible. He should have thought things through and invested in caravans as spring turned to summer and the sun beat down on Tyre and Sidon.

Over the years I developed a decidedly soft spot for Jim’s Tavern, who avoided any late disasters that day and came home weary but triumphant. The same may be said of Lightonthewing, who made every yard over nearly three miles, rewarding the small band of punters who backed him at 33/1 in this modest handicap hurdle.

With recent figures of FP0P he was rediscovering his form of many months ago and no one minded because trainer Sue Gardner is an unflinching optimist despite many routine setbacks. Her scarf took flight amidst the celebrations as daughter Lucy returned to scale. They are proper racing people or, more correctly, proper JUMPING people. Overall it was a pretty good day for Devon with Plymouth beating Liverpool. As far as we could tell, no one backed the double.

Jimmy ‘Marvel’ Mason, a lifelong friend I hadn’t seen for a while, shook his head. ‘Unbelievable,’ he said, which was quite unusual for someone who started exchanging comics outside Saturday morning cinema when he was fourteen and amassed a fortune when the American equivalent  –  the ‘funny papers’ took off here.

Things which other people barely noticed mattered as much as life itself to Marvel, the disappearance of Biffo the Bear from the front page of the Beano being a good example. He lost a lot of money when Lloyds collapsed but made a partial recovery by offering the old ‘wordy’ comics  –  the Adventure, Hotspur, Rover and Wizard  –  in smart packs of four.

‘You know, you’re the only person who remembers Wally Brand,’ he once said to me. Well, it may be true. Wally  –  ‘the Ball of Fire’  –  was marooned in the lower leagues north of the border as punishment for some misdemeanour but came to the rescue of an English 1^st Division club fighting relegation. He scored a hatful, of course, his little feet ‘going like trip hammers’ if memory serves.

Marvel has a wry sense of humour and knows how to take the mickey out of himself. When Lloyds went down he delighted in being introduced to anyone called Dan and would wink conspiratorially at the stranger, lowering his voice and whispering: ‘I know you’ve done very well. Actually, I’m going through a bit of a bad patch myself. In fact, I’m desperate……Dan’. He’d lifted it from the huge 1980s television hit Boys from the Blackstuff about the Liverpool building trade during a recession. References to Auntie Aggie and cow pie peppered his conversation and he considered the closure of the Dandy, with Desperate Dan on the front, a national disgrace.

‘This may be an unbelievable result but you must still be well ahead after the Schweppes yesterday?’ I suggested. Marvel would never have missed the winner Joyeuse because he is a committed follower of grey mares and was still whistling the old tune Widecombe Fair when we left the course.

‘I don’t really see how anyone missed her,’ he mused. ‘A rapidly improving filly in JP McManus’s colours with only 10st 7lbs to carry for a trainer who’d already won the race six times. And she’s a grey, of course.

‘I once thought of a comic strip involving all those characters  –  Tom Pearce, Bill Brewer, Peter Gurney, Peter Davy, Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all, and I’m sure it would have gone down well in a local Devon paper but I needed something national. The song goes back well over a hundred years, you know, and was said to be very popular with the Devonshire Regiment in the Boer War, but no one knows if those individuals were real or imagined’.

A day or two later Marvel rang me up. ‘Did you see Sue Gardner told the stewards that Lightonthewing had appreciated returning to hurdles? Quite interesting, given that his overall record still has fences 5-2 ahead in wins. Just like old Richmond Sturdy telling the Brighton officials that Loughborough George, who’d just gone in at 11/1, seemed to prefer racing at seaside tracks because of the nature of the soil.

If they’d read the paper they’d have seen it finished unplaced at Yarmouth the day before. Crazy game, isn’t it? That’s why we love it so much!’

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