there’s nothing wrong with this one.”
“But surely a trainer of your standing should have a better car than this. How about a BMW, for example?”
I had really believed she was about to cry again, and quite suddenly, I had been angry with myself. What was I doing? I tried to see myself as she would have, and I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it one bit. So I had turned away and climbed the stairs to my room like a naughty boy.
How long, I wondered, should I remain in my room before I had paid sufficient penance for my misdeeds? An hour? A day? A week? A lifetime?
I sat up on the side of the bed and decided to write to the staff at the rehab center to thank them for their care and to apologize for my consistent lack of good humor.
Maybe then they might just believe that I meant it.
4
T he remainder of Sunday proved to be a quiet day at Kauri House Stables, with the human residents managing to stay out of arguing distance.
In the afternoon I ventured out into Lambourn, deciding to go for a walk, mostly just to get me out of the house but also because I was curious about how much the place had changed over fifteen years. I didn’t intend to go very far. It had been only a week or so since I’d thrown away the crutches, and my leg tended to tire easily.
There were a few more houses than I remembered, a new estate of smart little homes with postage-stamp gardens having sprung up in what once had been a field full of ponies. But overall, the village was as familiar as it had been when I’d delivered the morning papers as a teenager.
And why wouldn’t it have been? The previous fifteen years may have changed me a great deal, but it was a mere blink of an eye compared to the long history of human habitation in Lambourn.
Modern documented Lambourn dated from the ninth century when the church and village were named in the will of King Alfred, the mighty king of the Saxons, the only monarch of England to have ever been designated “The Great.”
But Lambourn had a history that stretched back far further than medieval times. Numerous Bronze Age burial grounds existed on the hills just north of the modern village, together with The Ridge-way, the Stone Age superhighway that had once stretched from the Dorset coast to The Wash.
Nowadays, Lambourn and its surroundings were known as The Valley of the Racehorse, but the racing industry was a relative newcomer. First records show that racehorses were trained here in the late eighteenth century, but it was not until the arrival of the railway a hundred years later that Lambourn became established as a national center for racing, and jump racing in particular, to rival that at Newmarket. Trains enabled the horses to be sent to racetracks farther and farther from home, and hence a national sport was established.
But the major factor that made Lambourn such a wonderful place for horses was simple geology, and had nothing to do with man.
Whereas the rolling Berkshire Downs certainly lent themselves so ideally to the formation of the gallops and the training of the horses, it is what lay beneath the turf that made the real difference. The Downs, together with the Chiltern Hills, were created many millions of years ago, laid down as sediment in some prehistoric organism-rich sea. Billions and billions of primitive sea creatures died, and their skeletons drifted to the bottom, over time being compressed into rock, into the white chalk we see today. It is almost pure calcium carbonate, and the grass that grows on such a base is rich in calcium, ideal for the formation of strong bone in grass-eating racehorses.
I wandered down to the center of the village, past the Norman church that sometime in the twelfth century had replaced the earlier Saxon version. Even though I was not what was known as a “regular” churchgoer, I had been into Lambourn Church many times, mostly along with the other boys and girls from the local primary school. My memory was of somewhere cold, and
“But surely a trainer of your standing should have a better car than this. How about a BMW, for example?”
I had really believed she was about to cry again, and quite suddenly, I had been angry with myself. What was I doing? I tried to see myself as she would have, and I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it one bit. So I had turned away and climbed the stairs to my room like a naughty boy.
How long, I wondered, should I remain in my room before I had paid sufficient penance for my misdeeds? An hour? A day? A week? A lifetime?
I sat up on the side of the bed and decided to write to the staff at the rehab center to thank them for their care and to apologize for my consistent lack of good humor.
Maybe then they might just believe that I meant it.
4
T he remainder of Sunday proved to be a quiet day at Kauri House Stables, with the human residents managing to stay out of arguing distance.
In the afternoon I ventured out into Lambourn, deciding to go for a walk, mostly just to get me out of the house but also because I was curious about how much the place had changed over fifteen years. I didn’t intend to go very far. It had been only a week or so since I’d thrown away the crutches, and my leg tended to tire easily.
There were a few more houses than I remembered, a new estate of smart little homes with postage-stamp gardens having sprung up in what once had been a field full of ponies. But overall, the village was as familiar as it had been when I’d delivered the morning papers as a teenager.
And why wouldn’t it have been? The previous fifteen years may have changed me a great deal, but it was a mere blink of an eye compared to the long history of human habitation in Lambourn.
Modern documented Lambourn dated from the ninth century when the church and village were named in the will of King Alfred, the mighty king of the Saxons, the only monarch of England to have ever been designated “The Great.”
But Lambourn had a history that stretched back far further than medieval times. Numerous Bronze Age burial grounds existed on the hills just north of the modern village, together with The Ridge-way, the Stone Age superhighway that had once stretched from the Dorset coast to The Wash.
Nowadays, Lambourn and its surroundings were known as The Valley of the Racehorse, but the racing industry was a relative newcomer. First records show that racehorses were trained here in the late eighteenth century, but it was not until the arrival of the railway a hundred years later that Lambourn became established as a national center for racing, and jump racing in particular, to rival that at Newmarket. Trains enabled the horses to be sent to racetracks farther and farther from home, and hence a national sport was established.
But the major factor that made Lambourn such a wonderful place for horses was simple geology, and had nothing to do with man.
Whereas the rolling Berkshire Downs certainly lent themselves so ideally to the formation of the gallops and the training of the horses, it is what lay beneath the turf that made the real difference. The Downs, together with the Chiltern Hills, were created many millions of years ago, laid down as sediment in some prehistoric organism-rich sea. Billions and billions of primitive sea creatures died, and their skeletons drifted to the bottom, over time being compressed into rock, into the white chalk we see today. It is almost pure calcium carbonate, and the grass that grows on such a base is rich in calcium, ideal for the formation of strong bone in grass-eating racehorses.
I wandered down to the center of the village, past the Norman church that sometime in the twelfth century had replaced the earlier Saxon version. Even though I was not what was known as a “regular” churchgoer, I had been into Lambourn Church many times, mostly along with the other boys and girls from the local primary school. My memory was of somewhere cold, and
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