Racing with the Colonel
Simon Blow
Cheltenham T have been staying for the races with a Ifriend of my late father. The two men had fought side-by-side during the last war, although Johnnie — as my father always referred to him — was several years his senior. Colonel John Musgrove has lived for many years in a stone Cotswold house, about the size of a small manor, some ten miles from the racecourse. I had not seen him since I was a child, and all I remem- bered of him was that he shook his head a great deal while talking and was of a big build. Then, out of the blue, a few weeks ago, he telephoned me: 'I say, do come for Cheltenham, old boy.' He told me that he had been thinking of my father, and wondering what had become of me. I have always felt at home with people like Colonel Musgrove, so I went.
At dinner after my arrival, the Colonel was soon into a variety of family stories dealing mainly with estates lost, divorces, and dissolute heirs. Colonel Musgrove was well versed in matters of landed property, who was related to who, and 'good' or tad' bloodlines. As the discussion deepened, it brought on a great deal of the head-shaking that I'd remembered. 'Well, I'm not a bit surprised they got into such a mess. Everybody knows that the blood on his mother's side is really quite appalling.' And when we turned to politics he was brief and to the point: 'You really can't trust any of them today — they're all so totally dishonest.' By the end of the even- ing we had settled back into the scandals of Profumo, Thorpe and Parkinson, which drew the following statement from him: `You know, there are two things which have destroyed this world: sex and reli- gion.'
During my stay I came to realise that away from the dark polished furniture and Lionel Edwards watercolours that gave his house its distinctive flavour, Colonel Mus- grove felt the threat of a world in which he was not at ease. A universe of concrete motorways and fierce red-brick shopping precincts — which have gutted nearly every county town — gave him a visible sickness. 'I just don't know how you young people manage,' he would say, repeating it. There were aspects of Musgrove that reminded me of Evelyn Waugh's Pinfold, who 'abhorred plastics, Picasso, sun- bathing, and jazz — everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime'. For Johnnie Musgrove belonged to an era when things had been properly made namely, his suits, his hunting clothes, and his car. However, he could still protect himself from the hideous new world that encroached on every side by wearing suits cut in the early 1950s, and continuing to drive an upright silver Bentley from around the same period.
Once at the racecourse the Colonel and I made our way towards the members' enclosure. He had a few comments to make about the new stands opened only a year or so ago. He informed me that it had turned Cheltenham into an Oxford Street department store. 'Quite impossible to find one's friends,' he said, clearly used to a Cheltenham that was socially no more than an enlarged point-to-point. Then he led me to a seafood bar placed in a surviving section of the old cream and green stand. But now it was not only for the gentry, but contained a fair mixture of racing's pun- ters.
As Colonel Musgrove attacked a plate of cold lobster at the stand-up table, some- body next to him gave a tug at his brown woolly scarve. 'Lend it to us, will yer,' said a man with a pug-dog face and the letters L-O-V-E tattooed on the fingers of one hand. 'Lend us yer scarve,' said the man again. 'No,' said the Colonel firmly. 'Come on, be a sport. Didn't anybody ever dare you to do something?' The pug-faced man, who was hiccuping through a pint of beer, pointed out his two friends, the darers. Will you please go away,' the Colonel insisted. 'Sorry, I'm a bit drunk,' the man now suddenly confessed. He then lurched back to his friends muttering: 'I never much liked your kind anyway.'
Disentangling himself from this encoun- ter, the Colonel took me to a quiet patch of grass outside the bar where others of his kind seemed to have found a little haven of peace. Most wore the traditional dress of the Cheltenham gentry: a rather loud check suit, permissible for the meeting, and a black bowler. Quite a few, though, wore trilbies and many of the young were bare-headed. Colonel Musgrove wore a bowler. The talk of Musgrove and his friends was whether anybody had seen somebody called Monica, and who might win the Gold Cup now that Burrough Hill Lad had been taken out of the race.
I drifted away from the Colonel's group at this point to see something of this legendary race-meeting for myself. As with so many equestrian events nowadays, Cheltenham has gone commercial. The meeting is no longer in an idyllic setting flanked by the wild Cotswold hills as in the famed Munnings Ointing. From the new paddock you now look down to a network of blue and white tents where companies and shops advertise or sell their wares. The only civilised tent is held to be the Turf Club's awning, where members and friends have often been known to disappear for the whole afternoon. But the new Chelten- ham was redeemed for me by the presence of a brass band that played adjacent to the paddock. On their red tunics they advertised Amoco petrol, but their melodies were thoroughly English. `D'ye ken John Peel' broke into 'A Night- ingale Sang in Berkeley Square'. They were the sort of melodies that I imagined Colonel Musgrove might hum continually to himself.
I never gathered very much about the Colonel's personal life, and it was not my business to do so. There had been one wife who had died soon after their marriage, but he did not speak of her. Like many in his mould, the Colonel played his cards of personal feeling close to his chest. But he did not lack for a social life. Apart from that first evening alone, we were out the next night, and the night after that he gave a dinner party. His friends were the local gentry and their wives, with the odd dowager thrown in. They lived in the county and had a delightful air of inno- cence about anything beyond it. 'What fun to write!' a lady said to me, as she clasped her hands deep into the lap of her blue silk evening dress. 'Do you work with your imagination?' They too, it seemed, were able to obliterate the horrors of the mod- ern world. Over the port one evening, the conversation veered from the qualities of Montgomery as a leader, to those required to make a first class huntsman. On Gold Cup day, I lost the Colonel after what had become our habitual sea- food lunch. I had gone to place a bet for the big race and the crowds were so thick, that when I returned he was nowhere to be seen. A friend took me into the Turf Club, for I wondered if he might be there. It was filled with ruddy faced young men — some wearing cavalry twills — and ruddier faced older men, all talking very loudly. At the sides of the young men were girls who on other days would have been wearing ftus" kies. And there were also some people popping champagne bottles a little too noticeably. I did not think the Colonel could be happy in this company. No, the Colonel was not here. Eventually I found the Colonel. The main race was over and the crowds had begun to disperse. I spotted his large for rising upwards from his highly polished broad, brogue shoes, his feet spread a little apart. He was standing silent and trans- fixed before the Amoco brass band. `hey had moved into 'The Teddy Bears' Picnic and I noticed how one brogue of the Colonel's was lightly tapping. His head was now not so much shaking as nodding, and the several chins with it. It was a most touching sight to see Colonel John Mus- grove, formerly of the famous '0' Battery, Royal Horse Artillery (generally known, for speed into action, as 'the Rocket Troop'), tapping the time to this nursery tune. But whether it reminded him of the parade ground or of his own nursery long unable wteorea,skof course, questions I was
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