Crossfire - By Dick Francis & Felix Francis Page 0,3

punctuated by brief but intensely high-adrenalin episodes where the separation between living and dying could be rice-paper thin. With the episode over, if one was still alive and intact, the boredom would recommence until the next ‘contact’ broke the spell once more.

I had always used the boring times to work on my fitness, constantly trying to break my own record for the number of sit-ups, or push-ups, or pull-ups, or anythingelse-ups I could think of, all within a five-minute period. What the Taliban had thought of their enemy chinning it up and down in full body armour, plus rifle and helmet, on an improvised bar welded across the back of a Snatch Land Rover is anyone’s guess, but I had been shot at twice while trying to break the battalion record, once when I was on track to succeed. The Taliban obviously had no sense of sport, or of timing.

But now look at me: taking the escalator, and placing my bag on the moving stairway while doing so. Months of sedentary hospital life had left my muscles weak, flabby, and lacking any sort of condition. I clearly had much to do before I had any hope of convincing the major from the MOD that I could be ‘combat-ready’ once more.

I stood at the bottom of the steep driveway to my mother’s home and experienced the same reluctance to go up that I had so often felt in the past.

I had taken a taxi from Newbury station to Lambourn, purposely asking the driver to drop me some way along the road from my mother’s gate so that I could walk the last hundred yards.

It was force of habit, I suppose. I felt happier approaching anywhere on foot. It must have been something to do with being in the infantry. On foot, I could hear the sounds that vehicle engines would drown out, and smell the scents that exhaust fumes would smother. And I could get a proper feel of the lie of the land, essential to anticipate an ambush.

I shook my head and smiled at my folly.

There was unlikely to be a Taliban ambush in a Berkshire village, but I could recall the words of my platoon colour sergeant at Sandhurst: ‘You can never be too careful,’ he would say. ‘Never assume anything, always check.’

No shots rang out, no IEDs went bang, and no turban-headed Afghan tribesmen sprang out with raised Kalashnikovs as I safely negotiated the climb up from the road to the house, a red-brick and flint affair built sometime back between the world wars.

As usual, in the middle of the day, all was quiet as I wandered round the side of the house towards the back door. A few equine residents put their heads out of their boxes in the nearest stable yard as I crunched across the gravel, inquisitive as ever to see a new arrival.

My mother was out.

I knew she would be. That was why I hadn’t phoned ahead to say I was coming. Perhaps I needed to be here alone first, to get used to the idea of being back; to have a moment of recollection and renewal before the whirlwind of energy that was my mother swept through and took away any chance I might have of changing my mind.

My mother was a racehorse trainer. But she was much more than just that. She was a phenomenon. In a sport where there were plenty of big egos, my mother had the biggest ego of them all. She did, however, have some justification for her high sense of worth. In just her fifth year in the sport, she had been the first lady to be crowned Champion Jump Trainer, a feat she had repeated for each of the next six seasons.

Her horses had won three Cheltenham Gold Cups and two Grand Nationals and she was rightly recognized as the ‘first lady of British racing’.

She was also a highly opinionated anti-feminist, a workaholic and no sufferer of fools or knaves. If she had been Prime Minister she would have probably brought back both hanging and the birch, and she was not averse to saying so loudly, and at length, whenever she had the opportunity. Her politics made Genghis Khan seem like an indecisive liberal, but everybody loved her nevertheless. She was a ‘character’.

Everyone, that is, except her ex-husbands and her children.

For about the twentieth time that morning, I asked myself why I had come here. There had to be somewhere else I could go. But I