Bustle and happiness

Newmarket it isn’t. Forget clipped hedges, purring security gates and decorated dovecotes. At Gary Moore’s yard in Woodingdean there isn’t even a name over the stables the other side of the road from the ten-furlong start on Brighton’s racetrack. I’ve seen grander allotment huts than the cluster of wooden and breezeblock stables stretching down the hillside, the rails chewed to a fretwork by equine nibblers. A number of the horses are clad in hand-me-downs, some still bearing the initials of former handlers. Forget the Tidy Britain competition, all the effort goes into the horses who, by contrast, look a picture. It is all about energy, bustle and the sheer happiness of a stable where everybody mucks in. H.E. Bates’s Larkin family would have loved it.

Searching amid wandering Labradors for the master of the yard, I found him washing down the six-year-old Zimbabwe. Son Jamie, one of our most talented National Hunt jockeys, was tacking up New Entic. Gary’s mother Lorna, widow of the stable’s founder, the one-time end-of-the-pier entertainer and used-car dealer Charlie Moore (who once landed a massive gamble at the old Wye racecourse with Senegal, a horse he acquired in exchange for five lorry tyres and wheels), still takes round the feed buckets. Everybody does their bit, the trainer more than most. A fortnight before, Gary and wife Jayne, who rides out and does the books, had been on a rare break in Barbados. ‘They were due to leave for the airport at 7.00 a.m.,’ says assistant trainer David Wilson, ‘and at 7.15 Gary was still carting feed nets.’