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For those of you who enjoy Hemmingway, you’ll want to read Beryl Markham’s memoir West With The Night. Why this is pertinent to a horse racing blog, I’ll get to in a second. Hemmingway said this about her writing, “She has written so well that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer...She can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers...it is really a bloody wonderful book.” From someone known to think pretty highly of himself, that’s a load.
Before she took up writing at the age of 40, she was a bush pilot in East Africa from 1931 to 1936. In September of 1936 she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean from East to West, although due to mechanical failure she crash-landed in Nova Scotia before she reached her intended destination of New York.
But before she took up flying, she bred and trained thoroughbreds to race in Kenya where she grew up after moving there in 1906 at the age of 4. West With The Night has some great passages about her days as a trainer in her 20’s. She was the winning trainer of the Kenya Derby six times.
Last edited by Cholly; 12-18-2020 at 04:35 PM.
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