Best Australian Racing Stories (17 page)

Down the streets of Liverpool he came, eventually to the side of the steel-grey ship that would carry him safely to this land in which I live—if she missed the submarines! And even then, they cared for him just like a baby. They led him quietly into a narrow stall which was strapped to the rails and stanchions on the welldeck aft—a box that was stout and strong as hands could make it with hardwood timber and strong steel bolts—but a box, my friends that the Storm Gods laughed at, as I shall tell you if you will bear with me a while.

Then they left him, with a pat on the neck, and a friendly word, and the sailors took him over. Now a sailor is a merry lad to whom his ship is as familiar as your bedroom is to you, but it is a rare thing if he knows anything about a horse. There is something incongruous about a sailor and a horse. They just don't go together. Yet the seamen did the best they could do for him in those early days. They could not know the things that bothered him and, even if they had known, there was not much that they could do about it.

The
Leaside Park
crept out of Liverpool in the dead of night, while far over her mast heads in the blackness the bombers roared away for Germany. She sailed into her place in a great convoy, and slid quietly seaward, with the destroyers whipping the grey ships into line, like shepherd dogs. It was not the bombers that worried the horse. Long ago, he had learned to watch them with quiet-eyed wonder.

Blackness was a thing that he was used to; but the low growl of ships' sirens, the hooting of foghorns, and the silver voice of bells, were things that worried him, though he took them quietly enough, shut away in the inky blackness of his narrow stall. But when they got to sea, that heaving deck on which his box stood was something new and terrifying, and the unaccustomed motion made him sick. For days he pawed restlessly in his stuffy quarters, and would not eat, but there was no complaint from him. The sailors did what little things they could to make him comfortable, and, as is the way of sailors, trusted him to bring them luck.

When the top door of his stall was open he could gaze seaward over the after-gun mountings. By being very careful in his narrow space, he could just lie down, if he had wanted to, and go to sleep, but he didn't want to—he just stood up, night and day, week after week, month after month, with that incredible patience horses have.

Now, an outward-bound sea-tramp takes time to settle down, particularly in wartime. All through those first few days men worked and wondered. In the back of their minds, both night and day, an alarm bell poised. Out in those dreary wastes of water deadly warheads waited, snuggled in the bows of a silent craft that shot to kill. Those were no times for song and shanty. Those were times to quietly watch and wait, and pray, if that was the kind of thing you cared to do. But the
Leaside Park
escaped them all. One day in the mid-Atlantic, some pennants fluttered at the destroyer's stumpy mast, and she turned south and wandered off alone.

I have sailed the seas in frowzy tramp steamers and penthouse liners, and I've travelled in diverse ways and circumstances. I've journeyed in tired old rusty ‘tea-kettles', clad in a pair of cut-down pants and a dingy shirt. I've slept on an iron deck from which the clang of shovels, beating on steel bulkheads in some hellhole far below, awakened me to savage toil. And then, again, I've sailed in seagoing hotels, in a private suite with a man to adjust my cuff-links and clean my shoes, but I've found one thing that is common to them all. Once the grey northern latitudes drop below a far horizon, then is the time that sea folk start to play.

The
Leaside Park
laid her course for Panama, and in a day or so she was sailing beneath brilliant skies on jewelled waters. The great horse shook his head and ate his food. They took his heavy rugs off, and in his lair, among the crated tanks and aeroplanes, he settled down. The sickness left him.

There was a little square of steel deck, perhaps 14 by 14 feet, a tiny pocket-handkerchief of rusty iron, facing the big bay's stall. On three sides of it the boxed engines of war crowded every available inch of space. On the fourth side, with the low ship's rail intervening, was the ocean. It was on that seagoing stage that the bay made his last great fight for life, but long before that happened it was the space on which the sailors met to pay him homage.

‘Brought us luck, 'e did!' they said of him, and in their hours off watch, or as they went about their daily business, they'd stop and talk to him, and pat his neck and rub his ears. And so, because the business of the ship goes on night and day, there was nearly always someone with him. He played no favourites in those early days. When the Captain came in his braided cap, he would incline on his head with simple dignity and accept the great man's gift of sugar; but when the midnight black gang came off watch in the early hours of the morning, he'd be waiting there to welcome them. These grimy men, with naked torsos, with black-rimmed eyes like circus clowns, and dead-white faces from which the stokehole's heat had drained all colour, were his friends, and he'd put his muzzle down and lick their blackened hands for salt. In the velvet nights the men would gather on the little square of deck and sing their quaint sea songs, and make their music, while from his open doorway he would watch them carefully and nibble hay.

I said he played no favourites. Well, that was true at first, and then he changed.

Sailors, I believe, are never horsemen, but there is an exception to any rule you care to make, and Red was one. I never knew his full name, but he was a pantry-boy with a carrot top and a freckled face, and inevitably they called him Red, and he loved horses.

I suppose he cared for ships and oceans too, or he would not have sailed on the wartime tramp, but in his snug sea-bag there were many books on horses and on jockeys—the great Tod Sloan, the imperturbable Donohoe, the brilliant Eddie Accaro—these were the folk the little lad adored, and here, on his ship, was a horse such as they had ridden to fame. A thoroughbred horse, with satin coat and long slim legs, mentioned more than once in the books he read at night-time.

When the agents ship a horse to foreign parts, they, in collaboration with the Captain, appoint a member of the crew to care for him, among that seaman's other duties. Usually the carpenter or bo'sun is the person. And so it was in this case, but eventually it was Red who got the job. From that time he was the horse's favourite.

‘Look at 'im,' a sailor said, as the horse turned from the carrot he had offered him to welcome Red. ‘Fair in love with 'im 'e is.' Then, as the big bay nibbled delicately at the lad's ear, ‘Rather eat
'im
'e would,' the sailor said, disgustedly, and threw the carrot overboard and walked away.

The master of a ship carrying precious bloodstock has an added worry on his mind. He is almost always a man who prides himself on the condition of the animals he carries, when at last he delivers them at some far destination, but as a rule he knows little about them except that he must follow close directions given by the agents.

And so the Captain watched the big horse carefully. On one soft, warm night, he walked aft on comfortably slippered and noiseless feet, and paused some 10 feet away from the horse's stall. In the shadows he saw a little figure astride the bay, with his knees drawn close to the horse's wither, and his freckled hands playing along the outstretched neck. He could hear a soft murmur as the lad whispered words he could not catch, and he heard the bay horse nicker deep in his throat, a soft, fluttering sound of infinite contentment, warm and exciting in the quiet night. Without a word, and very quietly, the Captain turned away and went back to his bridge. In the morning he called the mate.

‘Mister,' he said, ‘tell the steward we'll have that redhead lad of yours look after that blasted horse in his spare time. Tell Chips to do something else. Perhaps you'd better check over the stowage of those tanks. This weather won't last forever.'

The
Leaside Park
crept south and west, week after week. Almost it seemed she dreamed her lazy way down through the latitudes. Sun-drenched day followed sun-drenched day, and at night an indigo sky blazed with stars. These ships are slow. She seemed to slide through the amethyst sea carefully, piling on either side of her curling waves that broke into little capfuls of cream and blue, and these ran whispering and hissing along her steel sides. No sign of life. No other ship. No sight of land. Sometimes a whale broached on the far horizon, as if this strange intruder had awakened him from age-old dreams to come forth and welcome it with a derisive jet of arching water. Sometimes a flying fish would flop on deck, and beat in frenzy with iridescent wings.

In the long, hot days the ship's bells told the time in dull monotony, but in the midnight hours they sounded cool and clear in sharp, sweet music. And so she crept on ever southward, a squat, grey stranger, in a fabled world of whispering tropic winds and placid waters.

Through the drowsy summer days the horse grew sleek and satisfied. His quarters filled out, and his coat became more and more like satin, and he grew to look for Red. The boy himself lived in a sort of seventh heaven of delight, thrilled with the boon of a fine companionship.

But nothing that is perfect ever lasts. Almost imperceptibly at first, the weather altered. Just little changes here and there. But the Captain knew. He called them ‘the mate'.

‘Mister,' he said, ‘the glass is falling like a lift. I've never seen anything like it before. Something pretty tough is coming up. Call all hands, and get to work on that deck cargo. Double everything holding it, and bend a couple of extra cables round that horse's box. Tie it down hard, and tell the kid to stay with him, and try to keep him quiet. Get going. We haven't much time.'

Over to the southwest, a patch of inky cloud marred the marvellous beauty of the day. It grew, even as Red watched it, and spread across the whole horizon, and crept upward and outward over the azure sky. The sea changed from amethyst to a sort of sullen malign yellow, and the sun became a livid glowing ball. The ocean seemed a lake on which the grey ship travelled. A lake growing smaller and smaller as the horizons closed in on her. Then this lake began to twist and writhe as if some gigantic hand tormented it.

The grey ship plunged and rolled restlessly. There was not a sound except the sounds the hurrying sailors made. Then in a flash the sun was gone. The black horizons to the southwest flamed, and in this devil's light they saw a torrent of white water racing down on them. An instant more, and the Storm Gods struck—sprang the trap they had fashioned in far Antarctica—roaring and bellowing down on the little ship, with insensate, stupid rage, to maim and kill and drown. The world dissolved in chaos, became a raucous, flame-drenched universe through which the
Leaside Park
groaned and shuddered.

I couldn't tell you what went on in that horse's mind when the cyclone hit them. If he was terrified, he gave no sign, because Red told me so. The floor of his box was good hardwood. His front feet were shod with little steel slippers, and on the wood these gave him grip. His back feet were bare, as is the custom. Red shut his top door, ran a supporting rail from end to end off the stall, making it half the width, so that the horse couldn't roll too much if he kept his feet.

Red stayed with him all through the day, and long into that awful night, and no one but those two knew just how they made it. It was two in the morning when the boy was done. He told me afterwards that he left the horse to get some food. That bare ten minutes was all he thought he'd be away. He never intended to leave his great horse struggling there in that narrow stall amid that fearful pandemonium, alone.

But that little lad, I said, was done. He had to go. The horse's stall was just aft of the officers' mess. The little square of steel deck I spoke of ran along its portside wall. The boy told himself that he could hear the horse even in the raging storm. I said he was half asleep, but he was more than half asleep. He was nearly sound asleep as he fought his way to the little galley in search of food. Then suddenly, he didn't want food. He turned and stumbled to the mess room. Behind a table in a corner, a settee ran along the wall. Like an automaton he edged his way behind the table and sat down.

Then, as a marionette's head might do, if jerked by knowing fingers, Red's head fell forward on his outstretched arms. Then, before his face touched that table, he was sound asleep. That was when the Storm Gods struck again.

The horse had called once when the boy had left him, a sort of soft bubbling flutter deep in his throat. Then he set himself anew to fight this battle on that crazy, plunging ship, and he would have won it too, I'm convinced of that, all by himself. The wooden floor helped him. His steel slippers gripped it well. The wall of his box was padded, and the extra rail buttressed him, and so in the dead of night he struggled on. A thoroughbred! Oh, sure, I told you that.

Two hours passed. The plunging ship crept on. From high on the bridge, eight bells sounded, clear and shrill, in a night gone mad. And then? Well, then, perhaps half a mile to port, the great waves gathered, merging themselves for that tremendous blow. Mountains of tumbling water marshalling into one great weapon, as the Storm Gods made their mighty play.

The wave struck the
Leaside Park
just abaft the bridge, on the ship's port side. Down through the engine-room skylights the water tumbled. Over the deck cargo it smashed and roared, raced to the welldeck aft, and splintered the stallion's box to pieces.

How he got out no man will ever know. I saw what was left of that box myself, and marvelled, when the ship got to port. I cannot tell you how he got out; but he did get out. He snapped the thin manila rope that tied him to his manger, and in the maelstrom of raging water he fought his way to that little square of steel deck I have talked about. A slip—one mere step away from that iron square—and the horse was done. But, by some amazing equine miracle, that good horse knew it, and battled on.