Shade Murchieson’s equally awesome black gelding, trained by Marius Oakridge.
JUDY’S PET
A horse.
OXFORD
A foxhound.
STOP PRESTON, OH MY GOODNESS AND HISTORY PAINTING
All horses trained by Marius Oakridge.
LOVE RAT
Rupert Campbell-Black’s most successful stallion.
LUSTY
Love Rat’s son, Rupert Campbell-Black’s most successful liver chestnut National Hunt gelding.
MISTLETOE
Marius Oakridge’s lurcher.
NOT FOR CROWE
Incurably greedy tailless wonder, owned by the Terrible Trio syndicate.
PRICELESS
Seth Bainton’s beautiful black greyhound.
SIR CUTHBERT
A doughty dapple-grey warrior. Trained by Marius Oakridge. Owned by Nancy Crowe.
MRS WILKINSON
The Village Horse.
1
Bullies and dictators are everywhere, not just imposing their stranglehold on vast companies and entire continents but also creating reigns of terror within small businesses and even marriages.
Sampson Bancroft was both a Hitler at work, where he kept 50,000 employees worldwide on the jump, but also at home where he imprisoned, albeit in a beautiful Dorset house called Bluebell Hill, Etta, his sweet wife of forty-five years.
Sampson Bancroft had been so phenomenally successful in both property and engineering that legends were woven around him.
On one occasion, having reached a deadlock while trying to sell a thousand Bancroft engines to the Chinese, he had stunned the meeting by suddenly announcing:
‘If you’ll excuse me, gentlemen, I have to go and fuck my secretary.’
Although this was interpreted to bemused Chinese officials as a family crisis, by the time Sampson returned forty minutes later the world’s markets had shifted dramatically, a foreign power had threatened China and the deal was closed. No one was sure what Sampson had been up to but ‘having a Bancroft’ became City terminology for a quick shag.
Sampson’s courtship of his wife Etta in the early sixties, known as A la recherche du temps perdu, had also gone into folklore. Sampson, then in his twenties, was already running his own company, Bancroft Engineering, when on the way out to lunch he had spotted Etta, the latest temp, tearing out her lustrous curls in the typing pool.
Learning on his return that she had just been fired for hopeless incompetence by the personnel lady, Sampson fired the personnel lady.
Arriving home to her parents’ house in Thames Ditton, a tearful Etta, terrified of confessing she’d been sacked yet again, found Sampson’s dark green XK120 parked outside. Such was the brutal splendour of his blond looks and the force of his personality that he and Etta were engaged in a month, to the delight of her elderly parents, who were relieved that their dreamy, unworldly daughter would be so well provided for.
But even during their courtship, Sampson always put Etta down, and frequently quoted W. H. Davies’s ‘Sweet Stay-at-Home’:
I love thee for a heart that’s kind,
Not for the knowledge in thy mind.
It was Etta’s kind heart, ironically, that had most infuriated Sampson over the years. She would slip his money to charities or friends or visiting workmen, and listen endlessly to girlfriends’ problems on the telephone: ‘Oh, you poor, poor thing, how awful.’
Sampson also resented Etta’s passion for animals. As an only child, she had been particularly close to the family fox terriers and to Snowy, the grey Welsh pony, which her parents had scrimped and saved to buy her and whose photograph still adorned her dressing table. Sampson, who gambled thousands daily on the stock market, hit the roof whenever he caught her putting a tenner on a big race.
He was even angrier when he discovered that Roddy Smithson, the local riding master in Dorset, knowing Etta loved greys and hoping she would visit his stables more frequently, had offered her free access to a lovely dapple-grey mare. Sampson promptly forbade any further contact. He also removed his considerable custom from the local garage, on learning that the manager was servicing Etta’s Golf for nothing.
Sampson loathed men who effortlessly attracted women, particularly when, like himself, they were tall, blond, rich and arrogant. Etta’s pin-up, the owner-trainer Rupert Campbell-Black, whom she’d hero-worshipped since his showjumping days in the seventies, was therefore anathema.
Sampson resented his wife for being so lovable. For a start Etta was so pretty, her complexion delicate as apple blossom, her soft curls the glowing light brown of woods before the leaves break through in springtime, and her eyes, the dark blue of clouds ushering in an April shower, were never far from tears or laughter. She also had a lovely curvy figure (which Sampson had kept in check by weighing her once a week), slender ankles and the natural grace of a dancer.
But it was not just Etta’s prettiness. When Sampson wasn’t around, her natural high spirits and cheerfulness broke in.