Something for the Pain (2 page)

Bendigo was a quiet place in the mid-1940s. Few motor vehicles passed along Neale Street or nearby McIvor Road. Even halfway down the backyard, among my pretend-landscapes of farms and roads and townships each with a racecourse on its outskirts—even there I could hear as much as I needed to hear of the sounds from the mantel radio in the kitchen. What I heard were not distinctive words but vocal sounds: a chant or a recitative that began quietly, progressed evenly, rose to a climax, and then subsided again. I had never seen a horse race, but I saw every Wednesday the centre pages of the
Sporting Globe
. That thriving publication was always printed on pink newsprint, which made the dim reproductions of black-and-white photographs even more grey and grainy. The centre pages of the
Globe
, as everyone called it, were filled with results of the Melbourne race meeting of the previous Saturday. Around the margins were detailed statistics, and on either side of the central gutter were the pictures that I pored over: two pictures for every race, one of the field at the home turn and the other of the same field at the winning post.

The pictures, as I wrote above, were grey and grainy. As well, several of the racecourses of Melbourne were so arranged that the winning post was overshadowed by the grandstands from mid-afternoon onwards. As a result, anyone wanting to see in the
Globe
the images of the horses themselves had to strain to distinguish them from the murky background. This never troubled me. I learned all that I wanted to learn from the names of the horses, which were clearly printed in uppercase letters in the upper half of each illustration. Each name was enclosed in a boldly outlined rectangle, and from some part of the lower margin of each rectangle a shape like a curved stalactite led down to the head of the horse denoted by the name in the rectangle.

I recall still, nearly seventy years later, some of the first racehorse names that I read in the
Sporting Globe
. More than that, I recall the effect on me of my reciting those names in the way that the racing commentators recited them. So strongly do I recall the effects of some names that I am able nowadays to put out of my mind the dictionary meanings of those names and to see the clusters of images that they promoted long ago and to feel the moods connected with the images. I did not know, for example, the dictionary meaning of the word
HIATUS
or even whether the word was to be found in any dictionary. Whenever I saw the word above the blurred image of a racehorse in the
Globe
, I saw at once an image of a bird in flight above a deserted seashore or estuary. Not until many years later did I learn who were the
ICENE
or who was
TAMERLANE
. The word
ICENE
above the blurred image of a racehorse brought to mind a long silver-white robe worn by some notable female personage and the pleasant sound of the train of the robe as it swept across a floor of cream-coloured marble.
TAMERLANE
denoted for me a grassy pathway overhung by rows of tamarisk trees. Many names, however, failed to impress me or even repelled me. (It seemed to me then, and it seems still, that most racehorses are poorly named.) I can recall from the 1940s such drab names as
LORD BADEN, CHEERY BOY
, and
ZEZETTE
. The bearers of such names fared badly in my early imaginary races, which were invariably won by horses with appealing names.

I have hardly begun to describe the complexity of what I saw and felt during those imaginary races. Vague shapes of horses were in the background, but the foreground included more than names in uppercase letters and the imagery arising from those names. Hovering nearby were shadowy images of persons, most of them men in suits and ties and with grey felt hats low on their brows.

In the 1940s, and for several decades afterwards, racehorses in Australia were owned usually by one man alone, and all trainers and jockeys were men. Nowadays, syndicates predominate, many with ten or more members, but I grew up believing that the typical owner of a horse racing in Melbourne was a wealthy businessman or grazier, or a medical or legal practitioner. The typical trainer may have lacked the social standing of the owners, his clients, but he looked hardly different, and if he was one of those described by racing journalists as
shrewd
or
astute
he might have been even wealthier than they. Since no well-dressed or wealthy men were to be seen in the back streets of Bendigo, the image-men in my mind must have been derived from illustrations in newspapers. As for the men's histories or personalities, I seemed to have understood already that these were of little account on a racecourse; an owner or a trainer was defined by the performance of his horses.

My image-horses had image-jockeys, but these were mostly inscrutable. The nearest I had come to seeing an actual jockey was my standing beside my father at the Bendigo Showgrounds on a cold evening during the Easter Fair while a few harness horses paraded before the race that was run as part of a program of foot races and cycling races and axemen's contests. My father called out to a driver that he knew, and the man walked his horse to the outside fence, leaned back in his sulky, and exchanged a few words. While horse and driver were approaching us, my father had told me that the driver was Clarry Long and the horse Great Dalla. Clarry, like many Bendigonians, was of Chinese descent and his mostly expressionless demeanour made him seem to me more self-assured than myself or my father. Clarry was wearing the first set of racing colours that I had seen, and the same weak light from atop the nearby stanchion that made his face seem waxen worked also on the satin of his jacket. I have for long surmised that Great Dalla's colours were Brown, pale-blue stars and cap, but such was the play of light on the star shapes, on that long-ago evening in faraway Bendigo, that I sometimes decide that the stars on the brown background were not pale blue but silver or even mauve or lilac.

The meagre details reported in the previous half-dozen paragraphs all went into the making of the complex imagery that appeared to me whenever I heard from the backyard the sounds of a race broadcast. At different times while the chanted sounds reached me, I was aware of images of greyish-pink horse shapes, of horse names in uppercase letters, of spectators looking out anxiously from under hat brims, of jockeys with mask-like faces and vague-coloured jackets. I was aware, too, that much was at stake while these images jostled and vied.

The human voice is a marvellous instrument, and the ear that interprets it is hardly less so. I seem to have learned during my first days as a listener to race broadcasts that a caller is sometimes able to signal to his listeners, even when the field is a hundred metres or more from the winning post, that one or another horse will almost certainly win. In some such races the likely winner may have broken clear from the rest; in many a race it may be some distance behind the leaders but gaining noticeably. Whatever the situation, the caller is able to utter the relevant name with such emphasis that his listeners are spared any further suspense. In the dusty backyard, I was often unable to make out a single name but still able to detect the emphatic utterance that signalled in advance the result of a race and to hope that the name thus emphasised was one that I would have deemed worthy.

Driving alone nowadays and hearing reports of the progress of horses unknown to me, I often choose from a number of names the one that most appeals to me. I then suppose myself to be one of the owners of the horse so named or to have backed it to win a large sum. Then I listen intently, hoping to hear my chosen name uttered with the certain emphasis that I learned, nearly seventy years ago, to recognise. On one such occasion recently, the invisible horse that I aligned myself with had a name that appealed to me greatly but the horse itself was always toiling at the rear, to use one of the many stock expressions of race callers and racing journalists.

Even as a dreaming child, I had no wish to be a caller of races. I must have understood that I could never be cool enough or impartial enough during the running of a race to be able to report its developments accurately. And yet, I've been for most of my life moved often to hear in mind or to whisper under my breath or even, sometimes when alone, to deliver aloud a few phrases or a single word from a broadcast of some or another race never yet run on Earth. I was thus moved on the occasion mentioned above, after the horse with the appealing name had finished among the tailenders. I was driving at the time on a back road with bitumen wide enough for only one vehicle. I would have felt at liberty to express myself not just once but several times, except that I saw from the rear-vision mirror that a huge truck was close behind me. Apparently I had slowed down while I was preoccupied with racing matters, and the driver of the truck was now anxious for me to get back to the speed limit or to pull over into the gravel and let him pass.

I saw just then a signpost ahead on the left and I flicked on my left-side blinker. The road that I turned into was of gravel and overhung with trees. I guessed that it led towards the Little Desert but the paddocks on either side were well grassed and dotted with sheep. I found a place wide enough for a safe U-turn and stopped. I wound down the driver's-side window. I listened at first to the profound silence. Then I drew a deep breath and cried out once only what I had been urged for some time past to cry out. Then I watched perhaps a dozen sheep on the far side of the fence lift their heads and stare in my direction. I waited until every sheep had resumed its grazing and then I cried out again—not to the sheep but to the ideal listeners in the ideal world that I first postulated nearly seventy years ago when I first heard a disembodied voice cry out with significant emphasis some such name as
Something for the Pain
.

2.
The Drunk in the Dance Hall

I COULD NEVER
learn to dance. At different times during the 1950s my mother, my first girlfriend, and the instructors employed by two separate schools of ballroom dancing all tried to teach me, but to no avail. I am not by nature a clumsy person, yet somehow the effort to place my feet in the correct positions while holding a female person at close quarters and conducting with her an intermittent conversation—somehow, all this was too much for me. I went to a few dances as a young man and even dared sometimes to dance with some or another young female person. What am I saying? I never
danced
with anyone. I stumbled and tottered and tried to bluff my way around the dance floor, all the while praying for the music to stop, and I remain to this day grateful to the few young women, whoever they were, who glided backwards in front of me, keeping out of reach of my clodhopping feet.

I dared thus sometimes but mostly I preferred to lurk near the rear of the dance hall with the other young males who were reluctant or unable to dance. I knew that we were the male equivalents of wallflowers: those young women who sat through a dance because no one had claimed them as partners. Perhaps I even understood that we were cowards by comparison—the young women sat bravely alone while we males tried to hide ourselves in a pack. I wonder whether I sometimes tried to appear to be in earnest conversation with one of my companions, as though we had serious matters to settle before returning to the frivolity of the dance floor.

Nearly twenty years before my birth, my father hung about the rear of dance halls and, on one occasion at least, he had an earnest conversation with another of his kind. The previous sentence is perhaps misleading. My father's interlocutor was like him in being a reluctant dancer but quite unlike him in being drunk. (My father was a lifelong abstainer.) Perhaps the other man had been drunk when he arrived at the dance, or perhaps some of the young men present had been drinking beer or spirits in the darkness outside the hall, as would have happened often in the country district where my father grew up. Regardless of what or where the man had been drinking, he must have been drunk indeed to have discussed what he discussed with my father at the rear of the dance hall.

I am writing not history but a batch of recollected impressions and daydreams. With only a single statistic to support me, I mention here one of the most noticeable changes in racing during my lifetime. From about the 1960s, when off-course totalisator betting was legalised and became widespread, the number of on-course bookmakers has dwindled and such expressions as ‘beating the bookmaker' have become outmoded. Things were different indeed during my youth and, from what I've read and heard, things were mightily different before my time. I looked just now into the race book that I bought for two shillings on the cold day in June 1964 when I went to the races at Caulfield with the young woman who later became my wife. On the pages listing the bookmakers betting that day, 266 names appear. At the equivalent meeting this year, perhaps a tenth of that number might be counted.

The scale of betting seems also to have declined. Legalised off-course betting greatly increased the revenue of the racing clubs and more than compensated for the loss of gate takings from the smaller crowds. Much of the increased revenue went into the prize money paid to owners of winners and placed horses. For many years now, successful owners have been able to recoup a large part of their expenses from prize money alone. In the 1960s and earlier, the only way for an owner to show a profit was by betting. I knew a small-time owner in the 1950s who bet two hundred pounds on his horse whenever it started in a race. This was a very modest bet for an owner of those days, and yet its equivalent in today's money would be more than ten thousand dollars. When one of the leading stables was confident of the chances of one of their horses, owner, trainer and stable followers would organise a so-called plunge. Commission agents well known to leading bookmakers would descend on the ring at a pre-arranged time and would place credit bets of hundreds or even thousands of pounds all at once and before the bookmakers could reduce their odds. In the great days of betting, the chief concern of the connections of a horse was to obtain the highest possible odds on the day when it stood the best chance of winning. Many a horse was ‘set' for some or another race months in advance. The stewards did their best to ensure that every horse ran always on its merits or ‘tried', but in most races the also-rans included horses that were ‘cold' or ‘dead'—their jockeys were under instructions to have them finish in the ruck so that bookmakers would bet lucrative odds against them on the day when the owner, the trainer, and those in the know launched their plunge and the horse was at last allowed to show its true ability.