Old Alf shook my shoulder, and the fright in his face brought me instantly to my feet. I went where he pointed, up towards the nose of the aircraft.

In the second to front box a solidly muscled three-year-old colt had pulled his head collar to pieces and was standing free and untied in the small wooden square. He had his head down, his forelegs straddled, and he was kicking out with his hind feet in a fixed, fearful rhythm. White foamy sweat stood out all over him, and he was squealing. The companion beside him was trying in a terrified way to escape, his eyes rolling and his body pushing hard against the wooden side of the box.

The colt’s hooves thudded against the back wall of the box like battering rams. The wooden panels shook and rattled and began to splinter. The metal bars banding the sides together strained at the corner lynch pins, and it only needed one to break for the whole thing to start disintegrating.

I found the co-pilot at my elbow, yelling urgently.

‘Captain says how do you expect him to fly the aircraft with all this thumping going on. He says to keep that horse still, it’s affecting the balance.’

‘How?’ I asked.

‘That’s your affair,’ he pointed out. ‘And for God’s sake do something about it quickly.’

The back wall of the colts’ box cracked from top to bottom. The pieces were still held in place by the guy chains, but at the present rate they wouldn’t hold more than another minute, and then we should have on our minds a maddened animal loose in a pressurised aircraft with certain death to us all if he got a hoof through a window.

‘Have you got a humane killer[137] on board?’ I said.

‘No. This is usually a passenger craft. Why don’t you bring your own?’

There were no rules to say one had to take a humane killer in animal transport. There should be. But it was too late to regret it.

‘We’ve got drugs in the first-aid kit,’ the co-pilot suggested.

I shook my head. ‘They’re unpredictable. Just as likely to make him worse.[138]’ It might even have been a tranquilliser which started him off, I thought fleetingly. They often backfired with horses.[139] And it would be quite impossible in any case to inject even a safe drug through a fine needle designed for humans into a horse as wild as this.

‘Get a carving knife or something from the galley,’ I said. ‘Anything long and sharp. And quick.’

He turned away, stumbling in his haste. The colt’s hind feet smashed one broken half of the back wall clean out. He turned round balefully, thrust his head between the top and centre banding bars, and tried to scramble through. The panic in his eyes was pitiful.

From inside his jerkin Billy calmly produced a large pistol and pointed it towards the colts’ threshing head.

‘Don’t be a bloody fool,’ I shouted. ‘We’re thirty thousand feet up.’

The co-pilot came back with a white handled saw-edged bread knife, saw the gun, and nearly fainted.

‘D… don’t,’ he stuttered. ‘D… d… don’t.’

Billy’s eyes were very wide. He was looking fixedly at the heaving colt and hardly seemed to hear. All his mind seemed to be concentrated on aiming the gun that could kill us all.

The colt smashed the first of the lynch pins and lunged forwards, bursting out of the remains of the box like flood water from a dam. I snatched the knife from the co-pilot and as the horse surged towards me stuck the blade into the only place available, the angle where the head joined the neck.

I hit by some miracle the carotid artery.[140] But I couldn’t get out of his way afterwards. The colt came down solidly on top of me, pouring blood, flailing his legs and rolling desperately in his attempts to stand up again.

His mane fell in my mouth and across my eyes, and his heaving weight crushed the breath in and out of my lungs like some nightmare form of artificial respiration. He couldn’t right himself over my body, and as his struggles weakened he eventually got himself firmly wedged between the remains of his own box and the one directly aft of it. The co-pilot bent down and put his hands under my armpits and in jerks dragged me out from underneath.

The blood went on pouring out, hot sticky gallons of it, spreading down the gangways in scarlet streams. Alf cut open one of the hay bales and began covering it up, and it soaked the hay into a sodden crimson brown mess. I don’t know how many pints of blood there should be in a horse: the colt bled to death and his heart pumped out nearly every drop.

My clothes were soaked in it, and the sweet smell made me feel sick. I stumbled down the plane into the lavatory compartment and stripped to the skin, and washed myself with hands I found to be helplessly trembling. The door opened without ceremony, and the co-pilot thrust a pair of trousers and a sweater into my arms. His overnight civvies.

‘Here’, he said. ‘Compliments of the house.[141]’

I nodded my thanks, put them on, and went back up the plane, soothing the restive frightened cargo on the way.

The co-pilot was arguing with Billy about whether Billy would really have pulled the trigger and Billy was saying a bullet from a revolver wouldn’t make a hole in a metal aircraft. The co-pilot cursed, said you couldn’t risk it, and mentioned ricochets and glass windows. But what I wanted to know, though I didn’t ask, was what was Billy doing carrying a loaded pistol round with him in an underarm holster as casually as a wallet.

I slept like the dead when I finally got home, and woke with scant time the next morning to reach Kempton for the amateurs’ chase. After such a mangling week I thought it highly probable I would crown the lot by falling off the rickety animal I had in a weak moment promised to ride. But though I misjudged where it was intending to take off at the last open ditch and practically went over the fence before it while it put in an unexpected short one, I did in fact cling sideways like a limpet to the saddle[142], through sheer disinclination to hit the ground.

Though I scrambled back on top, my mount, who wouldn’t have won anyway, had lost all interest, and I trotted him back and apologised to his cantankerous owner, who considered I had spoilt his day and was churlish enough to say so. As he outranked my father by several strawberry leaves[143] he clearly felt he had the right to be as caustic as he chose. I listened to him saying I couldn’t ride in a cart with a pig-net over it and wondered how he treated the professionals.

Julian Thackery’s father caught the tail end of these remarks as he was passing, and looked amused: and when I came out of the weighing room after changing he was leaning against the rails waiting for me. He had brought the list of entries of his horses, and at his suggestion we adjourned to the bar to discuss them. He bought me some lemon squash without a quiver, and we sat down at a small table on which he spread out several sheets of paper. I realised, hearing him discussing his plans and prospects, that the year by year success of his horses was no accident: he was a very able man.

‘Why don’t you take out a public licence?’ I said finally.

‘Too much worry,’ he smiled. ‘This way it’s a hobby. If I make mistakes, I have no one on my conscience. No one to apologise to or smooth down. No need to worry about owners whisking their horses away at an hour’s notice. No risk of them not paying my fees for months on end.’