Best Australian Racing Stories (11 page)

We got Firecracker ready and entered him at Menangle in a race of 5½ furlongs, just enough for Firecracker. He won at 6 furlongs eventually, but ‘only just', as the horsemen put it; but that was later. At three years old he moved over 5½ furlongs like a swift machine, and then he'd stop. He wouldn't go another yard, except at a canter.

On Monday night when the show was all over, I called my Palais Royal staff together.

‘Boys,' I said, and then I bowed a trifle towards the grinning girls, ‘and ladies, I think the time has come to have a little talk. Now let's see, there are about 125 of you and I've been having quite a time taking care of you in this damn Depression. I think I'm right when I say most of you have been with me for years. I know you all have a faith and trust in me.'

A somewhat raucous bellow from the background interrupted me at this point. I paused and then continued, ‘Well, we're going to have a gamble. Your wages for your work this week are in the bank for payment on Friday, about £600, I think. I've got the change the cashiers use, and I've hocked everything I own, which isn't much, and tomorrow I'm going to put the proceeds on a horse.

‘If he wins, he'll save the Palais Royal. If he gets licked, well— that's the end of us, and I'm afraid you'll have to go to work at last. Now how about it? Two to one is the price you'll get, no matter what the price is that he starts at, and the rest is to go to keep this old show open.'

I could see Bill Swift. I could see him grin as I talked to them.

Bill was the lad they'd follow in a case like this, so I talked to him, and he grinned back at me derisively, and once he interrupted with his deep rich Irish voice, ‘Sure, boss, and it's a generous little soul you always were, so help me, and it's round your little finger that you'll be twisting us poor stupid goats as usual.'

‘Bill,' I said, ‘how well you know that, night and day, only one thought moves me, and that's your blasted welfare, else how could it be that you are my staff manager at your luscious salary, when half the world is starving?'

‘Sure and it's three-quarters of my luscious salary that you've been borrowing from me to feed your crackpot horse, who would otherwise be starving like the rest of them, and now it's the lot you'll take to bet on the feckless loon tomorrow, and that'll be the end of it, so it will, or me mother's name was Rachel.'

The delighted treble of the girls' laughter fought with the rumble of the male voices when he answered me. He was a natural salesman, this Bill Swift.

He was so many other things to me. Years before I'd advertised for a fighting man. I ran a show in those days, a fine big rink in a hard tough section near the waterfront, and I needed help because respectability was its slogan, and its patrons needed guidance in the civilised amenities as ordained by me. And so I had to have a ‘man of his hands' to help me in my inroads on my precious patrons' natural inclinations.

So many likely fellows came in answer to the advertisement, and when one stood before me I would say, ‘And now, my lad, do you think you could whip me in a dust-up?' and, because of policy or some other reason, they all said ‘No', until Bill came.

A great tall lad about my own age, from a wind-jammer in the harbour, thick in the middle even then, with a caveman's torso and lethal hands. With bright blue eyes under thick red brows, and a torrid head of hair. And when I said, ‘Well, Bill, do you think you could whip me?' he said without an instant's hesitation, ‘My flaming oath!'

So I took him to the rink's high roof where my small gym was, and we pulled the gloves on. He was a rough-and-tumble fighter, whose equal I knew but once before, but he was a child in the tricks of Mr Queensberry. I doubt if he'd ever seen a pair of boxing gloves. It was the rapier against the blundering broadsword, but I knew this was my man right from the start and ever since he'd been with me through tumultuous years of triumphs and disasters.

I think the things I liked best about Bill were his Irish sense of humour and his loyalty. With him, loyalty went to far extremes, and this little yarn will tell you just how far it did go.

Some years before we had rocketed out of Melbourne in my Marmon Speedster, Bill Swift, Steve and Bill Romaine, and I. We climbed the Gippsland mountains over the yellow slippery highway, and a summer cyclone kept us company. The narrow road was greasy, un-tarred, unpaved, and, at a point where the mountain was a wall on one side, my back tyres slipped, and the Marmon skidded sideways.

When she stopped, the car's rear wheels rested a bare 3 inches from the outer edge of a gentle slope that skirted the road itself, and beyond the edge of that slope where the wheels rested there was nothing. Two thousand feet below, the treetops growing in the valley looked like children's toys. The bonnet of the car thrust upwards at an angle to the road itself.

You know those old cars. You held the foot-brake on with sheer strength. The handbrake was nearly always useless. You didn't have hydraulic power in braking systems back then.

I knew I'd hold the foot-brake down for quite a long time, and I knew that when I got tired, as I must eventually, my leg would lose the power that kept the pedal level with the floor. I knew then that we'd go tumbling down to where the treetops waved so far below. I told Steve and Bill Romaine to get out quickly, but I said to do it quietly and with care. I didn't want to shake the car. Along the running-board and over the bonnet, and then onto the road. That was the way they reached safety.

And then I said to Bill Swift, ‘Now, Bill, get going. I can't keep this pressure on forever.'

Bill looked at me and growled, ‘No, boss.'

‘But Bill, why two of us?' I asked. ‘There's nothing you can do, that's obvious. You get out.' I looked at him and his heavy face was hard as granite, so I tried again in a different way: ‘Please, Bill.'

‘No,' he said, and nothing else.

I watched him reach for his tobacco pouch and papers. He rolled a cigarette and leaned over and put it in my mouth, then rolled another one. Above and about us the cyclone howled. He held a hooded match to my cigarette, and I said curiously, ‘Why, Bill?'

He answered, ‘Aw, hell, there's times a man likes company. Let's forget it.'

Then for a time there was nothing except the crazy roaring of the wind, and then Bill looked at me and his voice was gentle when he asked, ‘Getting tired, boss?'

‘Yes, a bit, Bill.'

Then I saw his eyes lift above my head and he said urgently, ‘Take it easy, boss. Keep that foot down hard, then take a look.'

I turned my head and there, coming round the shoulder of the mountain, a hundred yards away, was a bright red Buick Phaeton.

The driver had a steel tow rope, and he said he came from Denmark, which was a queer thing because my father came from Denmark, and you wouldn't have found another Dane in all that thousand miles of mountain wilderness, especially one with a power-laden Buick Phaeton and a steel tow rope, on that tempest-ridden day.

You have to hand it to a man like that Dane. He knew as we knew, because we warned him, that when he took the strain my car might slip that bare 3 inches and, if it did, then he'd go tumbling down with us to where those treetops twisted in the gale so far below.

We thanked him a little later when the Marmon stood four-square on the road, and we drank his fiery advocaat and went on our way.

So that was Bill and that was loyalty. A handy thing. And rare. So now I beckoned Bill to bend down while my crowd of dance-hall people waited.

‘Bill,' I whispered, ‘it's worth the chance. They'll get their £600 in wages on Friday, then we'll have to close, and they'd get nothing else except the dole. Now, if Firecracker can make it, we'll have lots of money to carry on for weeks, and this Depression cannot last forever. How about it?'

He looked at me with his bright blue eyes alight with laughter. ‘Sure, and I always said you'd talk the leg off an iron pot, but you're crazy, boss. Gold-digger will beat that long-legged loon of yours by half a mile.'

So I tried again and this time I was cunning because I didn't argue. I simply said, a little sadly, ‘Quitting is a queer thing for the Irish, Bill.'

He shook his head like an angry bison, and then stood up and his great voice filled that echoing dance hall.

‘Now, blast the lot of you,' he roared, ‘what's all this talk about anyhow? This bonny horse the boss has got is just a certainty. Sure, and it's a fine idea and good enough for the little bit of money he wants from us. Now, get about your work. We'll get our wages Friday, and for a lot of Fridays after that. It's a grand notion, so it is.' Then
sotto voce
to me, ‘May the good Lord forgive me for being Australia's greatest liar, because it'll be that chestnut rascal Gold-digger that'll be paying off tomorrow afternoon.'

By the price of him, the bookmakers agreed with Bill, because when we reached Menangle Gold-digger was at a nervous 6 to 4. We had come up in the Marmon Speedster over the dusty country roads on a lazy summer day, and there were eight of us all told in a motor built for four. They were the smartest of my big boys from the Palais Royal.

You didn't run a dance hall like that one without some headaches. Five and six thousand people in a night are a lot to care for in one big public place within four walls. They came and chattered, dance and flirted in that gaudy mausoleum, and as the night wore on the giant building shook and quivered with the thrust of stamping feet, or whispered like the wind brushing sand along a beach when the musicians played a waltz.

The smoke from cigarettes would curl up in lazy blue-grey layers to the caverns in the roof where brilliant lanterns hung in clustered thousands, and after a bit these would grow dim blood-red in colour, or hazy emerald-green, or faint old-rose. The jungle beat in the music thrust and throbbed relentlessly on the eardrums of the dancing multitude until they postured and grimaced and genuflected like a herd of mesmerised buffoons.

But you didn't succeed in a place like that because of coloured lights and mass hypnosis. You knew that among these multitudes there would be people who came to prey on lads and lasses out for fun. They didn't come to listen to the music. You had to keep the liquor out of crowds like these; I would as soon have nitro-glycerine in a place like that as sparkling wine. So you had your private army to guard your patrons from marauders, to rule your dance hall with an iron hand, and you knew you'd often have to use them in the hectic midnight hours when your famous dancing rendezvous exploded in your face.

I'd brought the best of them with me. I'd given them each one-eighth of all my money and their wages, and the funds I had borrowed on my car, my race glasses and on any other mortal thing I could get my hands on. Then, half an hour before the race, I gave each of my lads a square of bookmakers to work on. They were to commence to bet at a given signal. These bookmakers are hard to trap, especially at Menangle, but there were things that favoured me. I heard two of them talking before the race started.

‘Tom, what's this Firecracker?'

‘Firecracker?' Tom echoed.‘Oh, 'im. Some goat that fellow Bendrodt trains.'

‘What! Trains 'im, does 'e? Well, wouldn't that rock you! What next will 'e do? 'E couldn't train a rabbit to run up a burrow.'

‘Naw,' said Tom. ‘'E's got Cook riding 'im.'

‘What!' the other fellow said in pained surprise. ‘Cook! Why, 'ow did 'e get 'im to ride it, I wonder?'

‘Friend of 'is, I guess,' said Tom. ‘Anyway, we needn't worry about Firecracker, 'e's never had a run. Gold-digger is a certainty.'

When betting opened, Firecracker was at 10 to 1 and, when the money flowed for Gold-digger, I took my hat off and ran my fingers through my hair and, in a flash, eight good men commenced to bet as one.

In 90 seconds Firecracker was at 5 to 1 and, in 90 more, you had to fight to get the bookies to lay you 6 to 4. And no wonder. My lads were old in this game, and they had bet a lot of money—for Menangle. The vouchers they carried in their pockets would keep the Palais Royal going for a decent time to come if Firecracker won. But could he?

I legged Bill Cook up and said to him, ‘Now, Bill, this is serious. So pay attention to what I tell you. This fellow's got to win, because, if he doesn't, five minutes afterwards I'll just be passing Suva going strong. No foolin', Bill, you've got to win it.'

And Bill, who rarely paid attention to anything I said, or for that matter to anything that anybody said, looked down at me and asked in consternation, ‘But, boss, what's he done? He's never had a race. I can't come home without the horse, you know, it isn't done.'

‘Quit fooling, Bill,' I said. ‘Firecracker is a little peculiar.' Then, as alarm spread over his face and I saw him take a tighter grip on the reins, I hastened to add, ‘But he's fast, Bill, very fast. He's only peculiar because his mother was Persian Nan, and she was a wee bit mad, so they tell me. You talk to him going to the post and get his confidence. Don't hit him for heaven's sake, or you'll need a parachute to bring you down. And be careful at the barrier, Bill, because that's where he really gets peculiar. He'll only go for 5½ furlongs and then he'll stop as if he's hit a wall. So hug the rails as if you loved them, and don't make him go an unnecessary yard. Out and home, Bill, that's the ticket.'

‘Aw, for God's sake,' Bill replied morosely. He clucked at Firecracker and Firecracker obediently erupted through the gate onto the course and disappeared into the distance, with Bill Cook doing stunts that would have turned a Cossack green with envy.

They didn't have announcers back in the days I write about, and I couldn't see the start without my glasses. But the track was dry and sandy, so I knew when a bunch of horses travelled in a cloud of dust to a turn a quarter of a mile or more away. But I couldn't see the colours, and I didn't hear the crowd. I knew a sort of dull, sick feeling, and it seemed that every second was a year.