Warlight(21)

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Greyhound racing was already a jubilantly illegal profession. Millions of pounds changed hands. Huge crowds came to White City Stadium or the Bridge at Fulham, or visited the temporary tracks that had sprung up all over the country. The Darter had not leapt quickly into the business. First of all he investigated the territory. The sport had a pariah-like status and he knew there would eventually be government controls. Stern editorials in the Daily Herald were warning the public that there existed in greyhound racing “a moral decline that derived from passive leisure.” But The Darter did not feel the public’s leisure was passive. He’d been at Harringay when, after a three-to-one favourite was disqualified, the crowd burned the starting traps to the ground, he being one of many who was knocked flat by a water hose manned by the police. He guessed there would soon be dog licences, recorded bloodlines, stopwatches, even rules for the official speed of the mechanical hare. The possibilities of chance would grow small, betting would be based on reason. He needed to locate or invent a quick, slender entrance into the business, something up to now hidden from view, and squeeze himself into that margin between what had been thought about and what had not yet been considered. And what The Darter saw at the dog tracks was unjudgeable talent among indistinguishable creatures.

By the time we ran into him at Ruvigny Gardens he was importing a dubious population of unregistered foreign dogs. He had already spent a few years in the shifting tents of spivery. He had finessed the art of doping, not so much to give dogs strength and endurance, but to cause a hypnotic slowness in them, by feeding them Luminal, a tranquillizer used for epileptic seizures. The procedure involved careful timing. If they were given it too close to the beginning of a race, the animals would tumble into sleep in their starting gates and have to be carried away by one of the bowler-hatted stewards. But with a two-hour interval between consumption and the race they would run convincingly, then become dizzy when cornering the bends. Luminal-flavoured liver was administered to a particular group of dogs—for instance brindle dogs, or male dogs—so you could avoid betting on them.

Other concoctions invented on someone’s home chemistry set were tried. Dogs fed liquids gathered from human genitalia infected with a social disease suddenly became distracted by itching or were overpowered by unwanted erections and slowed down during the last hundred yards. The Darter then started using chloretone tablets, bought in bulk from a dentist and dissolved in hot water. Once again a hypnotic trance ensued. North American park rangers, he said, had been using it to anaesthetize trout during their tagging process.

Where and when in his past had The Darter learned about such chemical and medicinal information? I knew he was a curious man and could extract information from anyone, even an innocent chemist sitting next to him on a bus. Much the way he had picked up details about weather systems from Olive Lawrence. Yet he did not reveal himself easily. A trait perhaps left over from his days as the boxer from Pimlico, when he was light on his feet while verbally solemn, enigmatic but curious about another’s body language—a counterpuncher, a close observer, and then a mocker of another man’s style. It was much later that I would make the connection between his familiarity with such drugs and his awareness of my sister’s epilepsy.

By the time I began working with him the golden years of doping were almost over. Thirty-four million people were attending greyhound races a year. But now the racing clubs were setting up saliva and urine tests, so The Darter needed to find another solution where betting on dogs would once again not rely only on logic and talent. What followed was The Darter’s use of imposters or ringers in order to bring confusion and chance back to the tracks, and I became fully caught up in his plans, accompanying him as often as I could on his barge, the flood tides carrying us into or out of London on those night journeys I sometimes still yearn for.

It had been a torrid summer. We were not always confined to the mussel boat. Sometimes we picked up four or five dogs from a well-hidden Anderson shelter in Ealing Park Gardens and drove out of London with them in the back seat, peering out from the Morris expressionless as royalty. At a small-town gymkhana we raced them against the local dogs, watched them dart like cabbage whites across the marked fields, then drove back to London with more money in The Darter’s pocket, the dogs sprawled exhausted behind us. They were always eager to run, often in any direction.

Whether our imported ringers would be natural racers or collapse from distemper we never knew. But no one else did either, which was its financial charm. All we knew of the dogs lounging behind us as we drove towards Somerset or Cheshire was that they were fresh off the boat. The Darter never bet on them. They were simply there like useless cards in a deck to camouflage a favourite. Amateur tracks were sprouting up everywhere and we followed every rumour of them. I’d be struggling with a large unfolding local map, searching for a village or a refugee camp that had an unofficial third-rate track. In some of them dogs chased a bunch of pigeon feathers tied to a branch dragged by a car in an open field. One track we visited used a mechanical rat.

I remember on those drives how The Darter, whenever he stopped at a traffic light, would lean back to stroke the scared animals gently. I do not believe it was because he loved dogs. But he knew they had stepped on English soil only a day or so earlier. Perhaps he thought it would calm them, make them feel they owed him something when they raced for him on those distant tracks a few hours later. They would be with him only a short time, and by the end of the day there would be fewer dogs returning to London. Some would simply not have stopped racing and would have disappeared into the woods, never to be seen again. One or two he’d sell to a vicar in Yeovil or maybe to someone at the Polish refugee camp in Doddington Park. There was never sentimentality in The Darter about heritage or ownership. He scorned bloodlines among dogs as well as humans. “It’s never your family that’s the problem,” he announced, as if quoting some surprisingly overlooked line from the Book of Job, “it’s your damn relatives! Ignore them! Find out who can be a valuable father. It’s important to disturb rare bloodlines with changelings.” The Darter had never kept in touch with his own family. After all, they had practically sold him into the Pimlico boxing rings at sixteen.