‘Now take for example the different ways of stopping a dog. The first, the commonest, is strapping.’
‘Strapping?’
‘Yes. Strapping ’em up. That’s commonest. Pulling the muzzle-strap tight around their necks so they can’t hardly breathe, see. A clever man knows just which hole on the strap to use and just how many lengths it’ll take off his dog in a race. Usually a couple of notches is good for five or six lengths. Do it up real tight and he’ll come last. I’ve known plenty of dogs collapse and die from being strapped up tight on a hot day. Strangulated, absolutely strangulated, and a very nasty thing it was too. Then again, some of ’em just tie two of the toes together with black cotton. Dog never runs well like that. Unbalances him.’
‘That doesn’t sound too bad.’
‘Then there’s others that put a piece of fresh-chewed gum up under their tails, right up close where the tail joins the body. And there’s nothing funny about that,’ he had said, indignant. ‘The tail of a running dog goes up and down ever so slightly and the gum on the tail keeps sticking to the hairs on the backside, just where it’s tenderest. No dog likes that, you know. Then there’s sleeping pills. That’s used a lot nowadays. They do it by weight, exactly like a doctor, and they measure the powder according to whether they want to slow him up five or ten or fifteen lengths. Those are just a few of the ordinary ways,’ he had said. ‘Actually they’re nothing. Absolutely nothing compared with some of the other things that’s done to hold a dog back in a race, especially by the gypsies. There’s things the gypsies do that are almost too disgusting to mention, such as when they’re just putting the dog in the trap, things you wouldn’t hardly do to your worst enemies.’
And when he had told me about those – which were, indeed, terrible things because they had to do with physical injury, quickly, painfully inflicted – then he had gone on to tell me what they did when they wanted the dog to win.
‘There’s just as terrible things done to make ’em go fast as to make ’em go slow,’ he had said softly, his face veiled and secret. ‘And perhaps the commonest of all is wintergreen. Whenever you see a dog going around with no hair on his back or little bald patches all over him – that’s wintergreen. Just before the race they rub it hard into the skin. Sometimes it’s Sloans Liniment, but mostly it’s wintergreen. Stings terrible. Stings so bad that all the old dog wants to do is run run run as fast as he possibly can to get away from the pain.
‘Then there’s special drugs they give with the needle. Mind you, that’s the modern method and most of the spivs at the track are too ignorant to use it. It’s the fellers coming down from London in the big cars with stadium dogs they’ve borrowed for the day by bribing the trainer – they’re the ones use the needle.’
I could remember him sitting there at the kitchen table with a cigarette dangling from his mouth and dropping his eyelids to keep out the smoke and looking at me through his wrinkled, nearly closed eyes, and saying, ‘What you’ve got to remember, Gordon, is this. There’s nothing they won’t do to make a dog win if they want him to. On the other hand, no dog can run faster than he’s built, no matter what they do to him. So if we can get Jackie down into bottom grade, then we’re home. No dog in bottom grade can get near him, not even with wintergreen and needles. Not even with ginger.’
‘Ginger?’
‘Certainly. That’s a common one, ginger is. what they do, they take a piece of raw ginger about the size of a walnut, and about five minutes before the off they slip it into the dog.’
‘You mean in his mouth? He eats it?’
‘No,’ he had said. ‘Not in his mouth.’
And so it had gone on. During each of the eight long trips we had subsequently made to the track with the ringer I had heard more and more about this charming sport – more, especially, about the methods of stopping them and making them go (even the names of the drugs and the quantities to use). I heard about ‘the rat treatment’ (for nonchasers, to make them chase the dummy hare), where a rat is placed in a can which is then tied around the dog’s neck. There’s a small hole in the lid of the can just large enough for the rat to poke its head out and nip the dog. But the dog can’t get at the rat, and so naturally he goes half crazy running around and being bitten in the neck, and the more he shakes the can the more the rat bites him. Finally, someone releases the rat, and the dog, who up to then was a nice docile tail-wagging animal who wouldn’t hurt a mouse, pounces on it in a rage and tears it to pieces. Do this a few times, Claud had said – ‘mind you, I don’t hold with it myself’ – and the dog becomes a real killer who will chase anything, even the dummy hare.
We were over the Chilterns now and running down out of the beechwoods into the flat elm- and oak-tree country south of Oxford. Claud sat quietly beside me, nursing his nervousness and smoking cigarettes, and every two or three minutes he would turn round to see if Jackie was all right. The dog was at last lying down, and each time Claud turned round, he whispered something to him softly, and the dog acknowledged his words with a faint movement of the tail that made the straw rustle.
Soon we would be coming into Thame, the broad High Street where they penned the pigs and cows and sheep on market day, and where the Fair came once a year with the swings and roundabouts and bumping cars and gypsy caravans right there in the street in the middle of the town. Claud was born in Thame, and we’d never driven through it yet without him
mentioning this fact.
‘Well,’ he said as the first houses came into sight, ‘here’s Thame. I was born and bred in Thame, you know, Gordon.’
‘You told me.’
‘Lots of funny things we used to do around here when we was nippers,’ he said, slightly nostalgic.
‘I’m sure.’
He paused, and I think more to relieve the tension building up inside him than anything else, he began talking about the years of his youth.
‘There was a boy next door,’ he said. ‘Gilbert Gomm his name was. Little sharp ferrety face and one leg a bit shorter’n the other. Shocking things him and me used to do together. You know one thing we done, Gordon?’
‘What?’
‘We’d go into the kitchen Saturday nights when Mum and Dad were at the pub, and we’d disconnect the pipe from the gas-ring and bubble the gas into a milk bottle full of water. Then we’d sit down and drink it out of teacups.’
‘Was that so good?’
‘Good! It was absolutely disgusting! But we’d put lashings of sugar in and then it didn’t taste so bad.’
‘Why did you drink it?’
Claud turned and looked at me, incredulous. ‘You mean you never drunk “Snakes Water”!’
‘Can’t say I have.’