Don't ruddy well make me laugh. I'm off, and if the rest of you've got any sense, you'll be out of it too. "

No one, however, took his advice.

I found out from Charlie that Jimmy had been there two weeks longer than he, which made it, he thought, about eleven weeks.

As Jimmy strode defiantly out of the yard I went rather thoughtfully about my business. Eleven weeks, twelve at the most, before Humber's arm started swinging. I had been there already three which left me a maximum of nine more in which to discover how he managed the doping. It wasn't that I couldn't probably last out as long as Geoff if it came to the point, but that if I hadn't uncovered Humber's method before he focused his attention on getting rid of me, I had very little chance of doing it afterwards.

Three weeks, I thought, and I had found out nothing at all except that I wanted to leave as soon as possible.

Two lads came to take Geoff's and Jimmy's places, a tall boy called Lenny who had been to Borstal and was proud of it, and Cecil, a far-gone alcoholic of about thirty-five. He had, he told us, been kicked out of half the stables in England because he couldn't keep his hands off the bottle. I don't know where he got the liquor from or how he managed to hide it, but he was certainly three parts drunk every day by four o'clock, and snored in a paralytic stupor every night.

Life, if you could call it that, went on.

All the lads seemed to have a good reason for having to earn the extra wages Humber paid. Lenny was repaying some money he had stolen from another employer, Charlie had a wife somewhere drawing maintenance, Cecil drank, Reggie was a compulsive saver, and Humber sent Jerry's money straight off to his parents. Jerry was proud of being able to help them.

I had let Jud Wilson and Cass know that I badly needed to earn sixteen pounds a week because I had fallen behind on hire purchase payments on the motorcycle, and this also gave me an obvious reason for needing to spend some time in the Posset post office on Saturday afternoons.

Public transport from the stables to Posset, a large village a mile and a half away, did not exist. Cass and Jud Wilson both had cars, but would give no lifts. My motor-cycle was the only other transport available, but to the lads' fluently expressed disgust I refused to use it on the frosty snow-strewn roads for trips down to the pub in the evenings. As a result we hardly ever went to Posset except on the two hours we had off on Saturday afternoons, and also on Sunday evenings, when after a slightly less relentless day's work everyone had enough energy left to walk for their beer.

On Saturdays I unwrapped the motor-cycle from its thick plastic cocoon and set off to Posset with Jerry perched ecstatically on the pillion.

I always took poor simple-minded Jerry because he got the worst of everything throughout the week; and we quickly fell into a routine.

First we went to the post office for me to post off my imaginary hire purchase. Instead, leaning on the shelf among the telegram forms and scraps of pink blotting paper, I wrote each week a report to October, making sure that no one from the stables looked over my shoulder.

Replies, if any, I collected, read, and tore up over the litter basket.

Jerry accepted without question that I would be at least a quarter of an hour in the post office, and spent the time unsuspiciously at the other end of the shop inspecting the stock in the toy department.

Twice he bought a big friction-drive car and played with it, until it broke, on the dormitory floor: and every week he bought a children's four penny comic, over whose picture strips he giggled contentedly for the next few days. He couldn't read a word, and often asked me to explain the captions, so that I became intimately acquainted with the doings of Micky the Monkey and Flip McCoy.

Leaving the post office we climbed back on to the motor-cycle and rode two hundred yards down the street to have tea. This ritual took place in a square bare cafe with margarine coloured walls, cold lighting, and messy table tops. For decoration there were Pepsi- Cola advertisements, and for service a bored looking girl with no stockings and mousy hair piled into a matted, wispy mountain on top of her head.

None of this mattered. Jerry and I ordered and ate with indescribable enjoyment a heap of lamb chops, fried eggs, flabby chips, and bright green peas. Charlie and the others were to be seen doing the same at adjoining tables. The girl knew where we came from, and looked down on us, as her father owned the cafe.

On our way out Jerry and I packed our pockets with bars of chocolate to supplement Humber's food, a hoard which lasted each week exactly as long as it took Reggie to find it.

By five o'clock we were back in the yard, the motorcycle wrapped up again, the week's highlight nothing but a memory and a belch, the next seven days stretching drearily ahead.

There were hours, in that life, in which to think. Hours of trotting the horses round and round a straw track in a frozen field, hours brushing the dust out of their coats, hours cleaning the muck out of their boxes and carrying their water and hay, hours lying awake at night listening to the stamp of the horses below and the snores and mumblings from the row of beds.

Over and over again I thought my way through all I had seen or read or heard since I came to England: and what emerged as most significant was the performance of Superman at Stafford. He had been doped: he was the twelfth of the series: but he had not won.

Eventually I changed the order of these thoughts. He had been doped, and he had not won; but was he, after all, the twelfth of the series?

He might be the thirteenth, the fourteenth. there might have been others who had come to grief.

On my third Saturday, when I had been at Humber's just over a fortnight, I wrote asking October to look out the newspaper cutting which Tommy Stapleton had kept, about a horse going berserk and killing a woman in the paddock at Cartmel races. I asked him to check the horse's history.

A week later I read his typewritten reply.

"Old Etonian, destroyed at Cartmel, Lancashire, at Whitsun last year, spent the previous November and December in Humber's yard. Humber claimed him in a selling race, and sold him again at Leicester sales seven weeks later.

"But. Old Etonian went berserk in the parade ring before the race; he was due to run in a handicap, not a seller; and the run-in at Cartmel is short. None of these facts conform to the pattern of the others.

"Dope tests were made on Old Etonian, but proved negative.

"No one could explain why he behaved as he did."

Tommy Stapleton, I thought, must have had an idea, or he would not have cut out the report, yet he could not have been sure enough to act on it without checking up. And checking up had killed him. There could be no more doubt of it.

I tore up the paper and took Jerry along to the cafe, more conscious than usual of the danger breathing down my neck. It didn't, however, spoil my appetite for the only edible meal of the week.

At supper a few days later, in the lull before Charlie turned on his transistor radio for the usual evening of pops from Luxemburg (which I had grown to enjoy) I steered the conversation round to Cartmel races.

What, I wanted to know, were they like?

Only Cecil, the drunk, had ever been there.

"It's not like it used to be in the old days," he said owlishly, not noticing Reggie filch a hunk of his bread and margarine.

Cecil's eyes had a glazed, liquid look, but I had luckily asked my question at exactly the right moment, in the loquacious half-hour between the silent bleariness of the afternoon's liquor and his disappearance to tank up for the night.

"What was it like in the old days?" I prompted.