The Great Racing Read: Jocelyn Targett

[Wandering Eyes]

A whole library of recommendations but, best of all, sales catalogues

 

The weight of it in the front basket of my bike on the ride home from the library overburdened my steering this way and that, but dicing with calamity was a small price to pay for being able to savour Ivor Herbert’s ‘Red Rum’—hefty as a breezeblock—at home, face down on a candlewick bedspread in the mid-Seventies, my hands and fingers contorted into galloping horses as they raced each other, re-enacting the last euphoric moments of the 1973 Grand National when the bright bay with the white, puffed-up noseband reeled in the gawky front-runner, and racegoers hurled hats and newspapers into the spring sunshine.

If you’ve read it and have, like me, an imagination perhaps overly susceptible to being romanced, you too probably retell the fable of Red Rum sharing his nursery paddock with a filly foal who was later consigned to the same Doncaster yearling sale where, as consecutive lots, they both sold for 500 guineas. Six months on, the inseparable pair showed up for their debuts in the very same race (at Aintree, home of the Grand National – of course!) and… dead-heated!

All the Dick Francises; many of the myriad titles by the three Pullein-Thompson sisters; a reference library copy of ‘Ruff’s Guide To The Turf, 1978’, with screeds of baffling auction returns elegantly typeset on ivory pages; ‘Black Beauty’. These were my earliest literary fixations. ‘My Friend Flicka’, much re-read for the tragic passage where the untameable black mare Rocket clocks 35mph as she’s chased across the ranch by the McLaughlins in their Studebaker, before rearing up and killing herself.

A small collection of ‘Cope’s Racegoer’s Encyclopaedia’ (1948, 1949, 1950 and 1952), given to me by the retired bookmaker who lived next door, the first one inscribed ‘To Jocelyn, May the going always be good for you’, and the pages still occasionally turned at bedtimes and quiet times.

For proper grown-up racing reading, there’s Laura Hillenbrand’s free-ranging ‘Seabiscuit’, with that unforgettable yarn about the sliding muckheap of Tijuana (‘Tee-a Joo-ana’); studious editions on the Thoroughbred by Peter Willett and Chris McGrath; Charles Dickens’s pleasurable journalism about the Derby of 1851 when things were so rough two magistrates were set up in the grandstand to sit in judgment of the day’s pickpockets and thimble-riggers. Tesio, of course, and Hislop. The late-March treat that is Timeform’s ‘Racehorses’ annual. Racing novels ‘Derby Day’ and ‘Horse Heaven’ by upmarket writers D.J. Taylor and Jane Smiley.

But my favourite racing book (or, rather, books plural: they’re published in an unending series) comes with no cast of characters and barely a complete sentence. It’s: the next sales catalogue. You’ll struggle even to find a verb or an adjective beyond ‘bay’ or ‘chestnut’ but I find them beguilingly unputdownable, each page telling the story of decades of winning and losing, hoping and failing, cheering and walking away disconsolate. In the late-Seventies, Kentucky farms photographed their sales yearlings on hazy summer days, cavorting through knee-deep grass. I loved those ads, but in truth I’ve never found catalogues in need of enlivening. My all-time favourites are the slim Agence Française ‘Vente de Sélection’ books of the early-1980s, with silver covers and stiff orange cards dividing each day’s offerings. I hungrily read them face down too, on the beach on family camping holidays in the south of France, despoiling them with sand and suntan lotion as I gathered quizzical glances, the 14-year-old boy with sunburn and a pudding-bowl haircut making his hands into horses.

 

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