Dick Francis
Second Wind
My sincere thanks
to
John Kettley
meteorologist
Felix Francis
physicist
Merrick Francis
horseman
and
Norma Jean Bennett
Ethel Smith
Frank Roulstone
Caroline Green
Alan Griffin
Andy Hibbert
Pilar Bush Gordon
Steve Pickering
The Cayman Islands National Archive
and
Anne Francis
for the title
Prologue
Delirium brings comfort to the dying.
I had lived in an ordered world. Salary had mattered, and timetables. My grandmother belonged there with her fears.
‘But isn’t there a risk?’ she asked.
You bet your life there’s a risk.
‘No,’ I said. ‘No risk.’
‘Surely flying into a hurricane must be risky?’
‘I’ll come back safe,’ I said.
But now, as near dead as dammit, I tumbled like a rag-doll piece of flotsam in towering gale-driven seas that sucked unimaginable tons of water from the deeps and hurled them along in liquid mountains faster than a Derby gallop. Sometimes the colossal waves swept me inexorably with them. Sometimes they buried me until my agonised lungs begged the ultimate relief of inhaling anything, even water, when only air would keep the engine turning.
I’d swallowed gagging amounts of Caribbean salt.
It had been night for hours, with no gleam anywhere. I was losing all perception of which way was up. Which way was air. My arms and legs had bit by bit stopped working.
An increasingly out-of-order brain had begun seeing visions that shimmered and played in colours inside my head.
I could see my dry-land grandmother clearly. Her wheelchair. Her silver shoes. Her round anxious eyes and her miserable foreboding.
‘Don’t go, Perry. It gives me the heebie-jeebies.’
Whoever listens to grandmothers.
When she spoke in my head, her mouth was out of sync with her voice.
I’m drowning, I thought. The waves are bigger. The storm is worse. I’ll go to sleep soon.
Delirium brings comfort at the end.
Chapter 1
At the beginning it was a bit of fun...
Kris Ironside and I, both single, both thirty-one, both meteorologists employed to interpret the invisible swings and buffets of global air for television and radio audience consumption, both of us found without excitement that some of the holiday weeks allotted to us overlapped.
We both worked in the Weather Centre of the British Broadcasting Corporation, taking it in turns with several other forecasters to deliver the good or bad weather news to the nation. From breakfast to midnight our voices sounded familiar and our faces smiled or frowned into millions of homes until we could go nowhere at all without recognition.
Kris rather enjoyed it, and so had I once, but I had long gone beyond any depth of gratification and sometimes found the instant identification a positive drawback.
‘Aren’t you...?’
‘Yes, I guess so.’
I used to go for holidays to lands that didn’t know me. A week in Greece. Elephants in the Serengeti. By dug-out canoe up the Orinoco. Small adventures. No grand or gasp-worthy dangers. I lived an ordered life.
Kris stabbed with his thumb the roster pinned to the department notice board. Disgust shook his hand.
‘October and November!’ he grumbled. ‘And I asked for August.’
It was January at the time: August tended to be given to those with school-age children. Kris’s chances of August had always realistically been zero, but with Kris hope often outweighed common sense.
It was his streak of wild unpredictability — the manic side of his character — that made him a good evening pub companion, but a week in his company once in the foothills of the Himalayas had left me glad to return to home soil.
My own name, Perry Stuart, appeared alphabetically near the bottom of the list, ahead only of Williams and Yates. In late October, I saw, I could take the ten working days still owing to me by then and return to the screen on the eve of Fireworks Night, November 5th. I shrugged and sighed. Year after year I got especially chosen and, I supposed, honoured to deal with the rain-or-no-rain million-dollar gamble on fine weather for the night the skies blazed with the multi-coloured firework starbursts sent up in memory of Guy Fawkes and his blow-up-Parliament gunpowder plot. Year after year, if I got downpours right, I winced over sackloads of letters from reproachful children who reckoned their disappointment to be my fault.
Kris followed my gaze down the list and tapped my name with his finger.
‘October and November,’ he pronounced without surprise. ‘Don’t tell me! You’ll waste half of that leave on your grandmother again.’
‘I expect so.’
He protested, ‘But you see her every week.’
‘Mm.’
Where Kris had parents, brothers and a coven of cousins, I had a grandmother. She had literally plucked me as an infant out of the ruins of a gas-exploded house, and had dried her grief for my dead parents in order to bring me up.
Where batches of my meteorological colleagues had wives, husbands, live-ins and one-nighters I had — sometimes — my grandmother’s nurses. I wasn’t unmarried by design: more by lack of urgency or the advent of Cinderella.
As autumn approached the Ironside manic-depressive gloom intensified downwards. Kris’s latest girlfriend left him, and the Norwegian pessimism he’d inherited from his mother, along with his pale skin, lengthy jaw and ectomorph physique, was leading him to predict cyclones more often than usual at the drop of a single millibar.
Small groups of the great wide public with special needs tended to gravitate to particular forecasters. One associate, Beryl Yates, had cornered weddings, for instance, and Sonny Rae spent his spare time advising builders and house painters, and pompous old George told local councils when they might dryly dig up their water mains.
Landowners, great and small, felt comfortable with Kris, and would cut their hay to the half-hour on his say-so.
As Kris’s main compulsive personal hobby was flying his own light aircraft, he spent many of his free days lunching with far-flung but welcoming farmers. They cleared their sheep out of fields to give him landing room and had been known to pollard a row of willows to provide a safe low-trajectory take-off.
I had flown with him three times on these farming jaunts, though my own bunch of followers, apart from children with garden birthday parties, had proved to be involved with horses. I seemed particularly to be consulted by racehorse trainers seeking perfect underfoot conditions for their speedy hopefuls, even though we did run forecasts dedicated to particular events.
By voice transfer on a message machine a trainer might say, ‘I’ve a fancied runner at Windsor on Wednesday evening, what are the chances of firm ground?’ or ‘I’m not declaring my three-mile chaser to run tomorrow unless you swear it’ll rain overnight.’ They might be Pony Club camp organisers or horse show promoters, or even polo entrepreneurs, begging for the promise of sunshine. They might be shippers of brood mares to Ireland anxious for a calm sea-crossing, and they might above all be racecourse managers wanting advice on whether or not to water their turf for good going in the days ahead. The prospect of good going encouraged trainers to send their horses. The prospect of many runners encouraged spectators to arrive in crowds. ‘Good going’ was gold dust to the racing industry; and woe betide the forecaster who misread the clouds.