The horses of Hastings

The horses of Hastings

I never rode in a race; all my trackwork riding was in the last century, but it stays as a bright glow in the archives of my memory. The summer I went to pick apricots for a holiday job, in Hawke’s Bay, in 1975, I wasn’t thinking of riding at all, and I didn’t even know there was a racecourse until we drove past it down Southland Road. But when I clapped eyes on Cedric Shield, bent and bowlegged, his nose on the piss, and he was only my height a…