Free Dispatches From a Dilettante by Paul Rowson Page A

was to me a fortune, and one which I had no way of repaying, in order to win around sixty five pounds.
    As the race started my confidence had collapsed before the horses had covered a furlong. Roberto came out of the stalls like a bat out of hell and eased into the lead with six furlongs to go. My throat constricted with dry apprehension as the implications of my foolhardiness began to dawn on me. I turned away before the end and defeated, demoralised and destitute, walked slowly off into an uncertain future. Ambling along in the vague direction of the main road I found myself at the start point for the next flat race, which was about to get under way over a much longer distance. Thus the start was only feet away from the road along which I was disconsolately trudging.
    The jockeys were circling their horses in preparation, watched in silence by a scattering of people. The breathing and snorting of the horses provided the only sounds. The crowds and the grandstands were a distance away and part of a world that I had left behind. A woman suddenly said quite loudly, “Go on Lester I’ve got a pound on you” as the great man and his mount passed almost within touching distance. Nearer to where I was now standing I heard another jockey, Paul Cooke, respond to the woman’s encouragement by nonchalantly saying to a colleague “It’s got no fucking chance”. The thought crossed my mind that I should perhaps have consulted Paul Cooke with regards to the outcome of the previous race.
    That evening I went to the pub and did my best to deny the angst that I was so obviously displaying. It was a tough lesson to learn and I kept learning it for months as I struggled to pay off the debt. Even worse news came that a non betting friend of mine had won a considerable amount on the pools around this time. As Gore Vidal once remarked, “Every time a friend succeeds a little part of me dies”, and it was a phrase that I thought about and related to no more than three times a day for many weeks.
    As the correlation between behaviour and happiness gradually began to dawn on me, together with the realisation that there are very few short cuts in life, it was the events at Knavesmire that enabled me to start growing up. It was to be an excruciatingly long process but it started that afternoon in York. For years afterwards, as if to help keep my focus on the journey to maturity, whenever I drove through the city I inevitably seemed to go past a popular local pub called The Brigadier Gerard which had been renamed soon after the race.
    My gambling habit had been instantly cured and going through the betting equivalent of cold turkey proved relatively easy. Elwyn soon had new friends to take racing and I wanted to get my life in order. Getting the sequence of personal perestroika tragically wrong, I took the high moral ground and stopped signing on the dole. However I had misjudged the zeitgeist and was laid off from Langdale Contractors the following week as building work hit a slow patch. There is a trite old saying that ‘Those who can…do, and those that can’t teach’. Having left the profession once in fairly dramatic fashion I opted for a cash driven swift return to salvation in multi racial inner city Leeds.

6.
LIVING IN THE CITY 1973-1976
     
    Those of you with musical memories that include Tamla Motown will recall this as the title of a Stevie Wonder hit from the seventies. Eric Prince was the Head of Drama at Primrose Hill High School when I worked there. Unsurprisingly he was known to all the staff as Prince Eric. He went onto become Professor of the Dramatic Arts at the University of Colorado but was at this point just another jobbing teacher - albeit one with ambitions. The ambition manifested itself in his declaration that he would write a play with input from kids, based around inner city life, racial prejudice, and unemployment. As part of the preparation a letter was dispatched to Stevie Wonder’s record company in