RACING/INTERVIEW PETER TOOLE:After a horrific fall on Grand National day last April left him in a coma for 13 days the Co Meath jockey is slowly but surely battling his way back to fitness – and is intent on riding again, writes MALACHY CLERKIN

THEY TELL him he was awake for nearly a fortnight before he left England but Peter Toole remembers none of it. “Not even the women,” laughs his mother Fidelma. A few months after the fall that nearly killed him at Aintree in April, he went back to the Walton Centre in Liverpool’s Fazakerley Hospital to meet all the nurses who helped him through those first weeks. A sea of strange faces greeted him that day as though he was a long-lost brother, full of smiles he didn’t recognise and familiarity he couldn’t place.

There’s a 25-day black hole in his memory that stretches from the moment Classic Fly hit the first fence in the second race on Grand National day to the runway at John Lennon Airport on May 4th as the aircraft taking him home got ready to leave. He remembers everything up to it and is doing his best day today with what came after but those three and half weeks in between are lost to the vaults, even though he came out of his coma after 13 days in Fazakerley.

It’s not the worst of what ails him – his speech is still plenty slower than he’d like and his shoulder hasn’t been fixed yet – but it’s frightening to think of all the same. Almost a month of his life wiped away, like corrupted files on a hard drive.

“Ah sure look, you get on with it,” says his mother. “That’s what you have to do, just keep going. When he was in hospital we were getting phonecalls from people at home asking what we were going to do but what’s the alternative? What do you do if you don’t keep going?”

Keeping going means concentrating on what can be done and not dwelling on what can’t. He’s just spent his first Christmas at home in four years and is fit enough and strong enough now to be out helping his father on the dairy farm they own a couple of miles outside Dunshaughlin.

They’d have taken that in a heartbeat back in April. Next Wednesday he’ll head back over to Oaksey House, the jockeys’ rehabilitation centre in Lambourn where he’s spent much of his recovery and in the middle of next month he’ll move on to seeing what can be done with his right shoulder.

“I’m going for an operation on the 16th of January in Cardiff,” he says. “I’ve been waiting on it for ages. They’ve done scans and X-rays and there’s a bone sticking out, sort of floating around the joint. A bit must have chipped off when they put the shoulder back in after it was dislocated.

“The power in my arm wouldn’t be that much. I can do anything I like with it but once I take it out to the side, I lose movement in it. I don’t have any pain in it in general but when I bring it out to the side, it can only go so far and then it hurts. They could have operated on it when I was coming round but they didn’t know there was anything wrong with it.”

That’s because when he was coming round, checking up on a dislocated shoulder was the least of anyone’s worries. The fall he took at Aintree was chilling, much and all as he shrugs now and says it looks no worse than what you’d see every day of the week on every track in the country. The John Smith’s Maghull Novice Chase was only 12 seconds old as he followed Ruby Walsh and Ghizao to the first fence on 100 to 1 shot Classic Fly. But whereas Ghizao skipped across it with a neat action, his two front legs perfectly parallel as he crossed the brush, Classic Fly hardly left the ground at all.

In fact, the only part of the horse that crossed the fence before Toole was its head, which did so at a 45-degree angle to the ground and left his jockey nowhere to go only out through its ears. Toole came down head first and bounced on the hard ground while Classic Fly tumbled through the air in his wake. Although the horse got up and carried on, the jockey was left face down and motionless.

It was a pile-driver, the worst kind of fall you can get. There was no evasive action he could have taken, no side door out of which to make his exit. As soon as the horse dove for the ground, Toole was doomed to whatever the fates had in mind for him. He’s right, these falls do happen every day in his sport and the knowledge that they do is the best shield against the fear they’ll be serious.

Like most jockeys, he was born into the life with little or no nod made to any pretence that he had a choice in the matter. His father James goes hunting around Co Meath when he can and Fidelma was a jockey herself once upon a time. These days she breeds point-to-pointers and provided Peter with his first ever winner up in Tyrella, Co Down, back in 2005. She leaned on both her sons to finish school and get their Leaving Certs but that was as far as either was willing to go.

Peter went to work for Tom Taaffe in 2007 and rode a winner in his first ever hurdle race on Emotional Moment, fighting out a breathless finish in Navan a fortnight before Christmas that year to nick a decent pot by half a length. Work dried up the following season though and he was on the point of giving up when word came through that there might be a job going in England with Charlie Mann. He went over for four days in August to see if there was anything doing and whatever impression he made, Mann’s head lad Jeremy Young told him there was a slot for him there if he wanted it.

So he hopped on the never-ending travelator that makes up the English racing circuit. To complete a quirky little trifecta, he rode a winner in his first ever race for Mann too. He got himself a car that wouldn’t expect to be treated delicately and covered the length and breadth of Britain in it.

Mann was his boss but he rode for whoever would have him when his gaffer had nothing going. In just a couple of seasons, he clocked up rides for over 100 trainers. He went racing seven days a week, snatching days off only when he got injured or suspended. Out of 674 rides, he managed to pilot 68 of them home in front and clocked up prizemoney in the region of €300,000 for various owners.

“I loved it, every minute of it,” he says. “There was so much racing to go to. I have 35,000 miles on my car and I’ve only had it since 2008. I was living in Lambourn and driving everywhere. I just love it. When you’re riding horses like Fine Parchment and Rebecca’s Choice, your life couldn’t get any easier. You’ll drive all over the country for them.”

Classic Fly was trained by Arthur Whiting, a small-yard handler from Gloucestershire. In 34 races before Toole sat up on him, he’d only ever won once and that was a full 18 months before Aintree. There was no earthly hope of him making an impression on the race, not against horses of the class of Finian’s Rainbow and Ghizao who had gone off as first and second favourite in the Arkle the previous month. But for the chance to line up on for a race on Grand National day, to trot down to the start beside Walsh, Barry Geraghty and Tony McCoy, there was no way he’d ever let a ride like that go.

“Aw, it was brilliant,” he says. “Aintree is everyone’s dream. This race wasn’t over the big fences but they were there and you could see them. Jumping over them, that’s what you want to be doing with your life. They’re where you want to be.”

But the fall ended his dream day and for weeks afterwards his family lived on their nerves by his bedside. Aintree put them up in a cottage on the racecourse for the duration and the Injured Jockey’s Fund (IJF) sent someone to be with them and help them out for as long as it took. He opened his eyes after 13 days and was well enough to be moved to Beaumont Hospital in Dublin within a month.

After the initial threat to his life had passed, they set about getting him better. Physically, the news wasn’t as bad as it might have been – a wheelchair they provided him with got tossed to one side within a week and he was able to stand on his own and walk within a couple of months. But straight away, it was clear his speech would be affected. “It was double Dutch at the start,” says Fidelma. “He was slurring his words and although we could understand him, alright, not everyone could. That was the effect of the head injury.

“As long as he remembers to speak slowly and loudly it’s not so bad. But they basically had to teach him to speak all over again. I think they will probably do another bit of speech therapy with him now in the new year once the shoulder is sorted out. They’re concentrating more on the physical end of it just for the minute but I suppose Oaksey House wouldn’t ever have needed a speech therapist before Peter.”

Oaksey House was where he went thanks to the IJF after a spell in the National Rehabilitation Centre in Dún Laoghaire. A state-of-the-art complex in Lambourn, it’s where he will complete his recovery over the coming year. His mother says that if he wants to go back riding at the end of it, he’ll get every encouragement from his family. His doctors aren’t just as enthusiastic at the idea as he is but then you wouldn’t expect them to be. They have their life, he has his.

“I haven’t thought about what happens if I don’t get back riding,” he says. “I wouldn’t be able to do anything else. I’m not clever. I was crap in school. I hated it and was just never interested. My bag never left the school. As soon as the last bell went, I dropped the bag and walked out the road to go home. Racing is all I know.”

On Wednesday afternoon, he flicked on the racing to find that a horse of John O’Shea’s called Cityar had won the 12.50 at Catterick and then one trained by Barry Leavy called Masterofinterior had won 40 minutes later at Leicester. He’d won on both horses earlier in the year and here they were winning Christmas races while he was at home on the farm. So for all the distance he’s come, for all the progress he’s made since April, it isn’t entirely surprising that he shrugs when you suggest it could have all turned out a lot worse.

“Could it?” he says. “Not if I can’t get back riding, no it couldn’t.”