‘How old were you then?’
‘Round about eight, I should think,’ Claud said.
As we drew closer to Oxford, he became silent again. He kept twisting his neck to see if Jackie was all right, to touch him, to stroke his head, and once he turned around and knelt on the seat to gather more straw around the dog, murmuring something about a draught. We drove around the fringe of Oxford and into a network of narrow open country roads, and after a while we turned into a small bumpy lane and along this we began to overtake a thin stream of men and women all walking and cycling in the same direction. Some of the men were leading greyhounds. There was a large saloon car in front of us and through the rear window we could see a dog sitting on the back seat between two men.
‘They come from all over,’ Claud said darkly. ‘That one there’s probably come up special from London. Probably slipped him out from one of the big stadium kennels just for the afternoon. That could be a Derby dog probably, for all we know.’
‘Hope he’s not running against Jackie.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Claud said. ‘All new dogs automatically go in top grade. That’s one rule Mr Feasey’s very particular about.’
There was an open gate leading into a field, and Mr Feasey’s wife came forward to take our admission money before we drove in.
‘He’d have her winding the bloody pedals too if she had the strength,’ Claud said. ‘Old Feasey don’t employ more people than he has to.’
I drove across the field and parked at the end of a line of cars along the top hedge. We both got out and Claud went quickly round the back to fetch Jackie. I stood beside the car, waiting. It was a very large field with a steepish slope on it and we were at the top of the slope, looking down. In the distance I could see the six starting traps and the wooden posts marking the track which ran along the bottom of the field and turned sharp at right angles and came on up the hill towards the crowd, to the finish. Thirty yards beyond the finishing line stood the upturned bicycle for driving the hare. Because it is portable, this is the standard machine for hare-driving used at all flapping tracks. It comprises a flimsy wooden platform about eight feet high, supported on four poles knocked into the ground. On top of the platform there is fixed, upside down with wheels in the air, an ordinary old bicycle. The rear wheel is to the front, facing down the track, and from it the tyre has been removed, leaving a concave metal rim. One end of the cord that pulls the hare is attached to this rim, and the winder (or hare driver), by straddling the bicycle at the back and turning the pedals with his hands, revolves the wheel and winds in the cord around the rim. This pulls the dummy hare towards him at any speed he likes up to forty miles an hour. After each race someone takes the dummy hare (with cord attached) all the way down to the starting traps again, thus unwinding the cord on the wheel, ready for a fresh start. From his high platform, the winder can watch the race and regulate the speed of the hare to keep it just ahead of the leading dog. He can also stop the hare any time he wants and make it a ‘no race’ (if the wrong dog looks like winning) by suddenly turning the pedals backwards and getting the cord tangled up in the hub of the wheel. The other way of doing it is to slow down the hare suddenly, for perhaps one second, and that makes the lead dog automatically check a little so that the others catch up with him. He is an important man, the
winder.
I could see Mr Feasey’s winder already standing atop his platform, a powerful-looking man in a blue sweater, leaning on the bicycle and looking down at the crowd through the smoke of his cigarette.
There is a curious law in England which permits race meetings of this kind to be held only seven times a year over one piece of ground. That is why all Mr Feasey’s equipment was movable, and after the seventh meeting he would simply transfer to the next field. The law didn’t bother him at all.
There was already a good crowd and the bookmakers were erecting their stands in a line over to the right. Claud had Jackie out of the van now and was leading him over to a group of people clustered around a small stocky man dressed in riding-breeches – Mr Feasey himself. Each person in the group had a dog on a leash and Mr Feasey kept writing names in a notebook that he held folded in his left hand. I sauntered over to watch.
‘Which you got there?’ Mr Feasey said, pencil poised above the notebook.
‘Midnight,’ a man said who was holding a black dog.
Mr Feasey stepped back a pace and looked most carefully at the dog.
‘Midnight. Right. I got him down.’
‘Jane,’ the next man said.
‘Let me look. Jane… Jane… yes, all right.’
‘Soldier.’ This dog was led by a tall man with long teeth who wore a dark-blue, double-breasted lounge suit, shiny with wear, and when he said ‘Soldier’ he began slowly to scratch the seat of his trousers with the hand that wasn’t holding the leash.
Mr Feasey bent down to examine the dog. The other man looked up at the sky.
‘Take him away,’ Mr Feasey said.
The man looked down quick and stopped scratching.
‘Go on, take him away.’
‘Listen, Mr Feasey,’ the man said, lisping slightly through his long teeth. ‘Now don’t talk so bloody silly, please.’
‘Go on and beat it, Larry, and stop wasting my time. You know as well as I do the Soldier’s got two white toes on his off fore.’
‘Now look, Mr Feasey,’ the man said. ‘You ain’t even seen Soldier for six months at least.’
‘Come on now, Larry, and beat it. I haven’t got time arguing with you.’ Mr Feasey didn’t appear the least angry. ‘Next,’ he said.
I saw Claud step forward leading Jackie. The large bovine face was fixed and wooden, the eyes staring at something about a yard above Mr Feasey’s head, and he was holding the leash so tight his knuckles were like a row of little white onions. I knew just how he was feeling. I felt the same way myself at that moment, and it was even worse when Mr Feasey suddenly started laughing.
‘Hey!’ he cried. ‘Here’s the Black Panther. Here’s the champion.’