Something for the Pain (24 page)

My dramatised story would have followed an upward trajectory, so to speak. I did not learn for many years afterwards that the man beside me in the cathedral that morning was at one of the lowest points in his life. My parents had been hinting for some time that we might soon leave Bendigo for the Western District. My brothers and I were warned to say nothing of this at school. We were actually excited by the prospect of a move to the region where we spent our holidays. Although, for much of my later life, I've thought of Bendigo as a lost golden paradise, I was not at all dismayed, in 1948, at the prospect of leaving it forever. And after we left, only a few weeks after the morning of the solemn high mass in the cathedral, our moving into a dilapidated house from which my brothers and I had to walk more than three kilometres to school seemed more an adventure than any sort of family tragedy.

I learned the simple truth many years later from my mother. I should have worked it out long before, but where human behaviour is concerned I'm the least perceptive of persons. I should have understood long before that my father's moving from Bendigo to the Western District at the age of forty-five could never have seemed anything but an admission of utter failure, either to himself or to his siblings and his parents and to those who had known him as a young man. He had left his father's dairy farm more than twenty-five years ago. He was not going to follow the gruelling life of a dairy farmer, even if it should lead, as it led for his brothers, to his one day acquiring his own farm. Who knows what exactly he looked forward to when he left home—travel? adventure? a wife and children? new friends? wealth? He certainly gained the first four but not, alas, the fifth. Whatever pretences he might have adopted, it would have been absolutely clear to his family and to anyone in the district who gave any thought to the matter that my father's arrival in Mepunga East from Bendigo was no triumphal homecoming but its stark opposite. The house we moved into was on the way to becoming derelict, the sort of house that passing children throw stones at or nickname the Ghost House. My father could not afford a car. While even the poorest farmer in the district chugged around in some sort of 1930s jalopy, my father's sole means of travel was an old pushbike that he had found in the junk room of his parents' farmhouse. He rode the bike five kilometres every morning before daylight to the farm of a widow whom, as it happened, he had known since childhood and who would have been well able to appreciate his comedown. He milked her cows morning and evening and did labouring jobs between times. He was a share farmer, on the lowest rung of the social ladder as it was envisaged by all in the district.

And why had he come to this? Because he had bet beyond his means—not once or twice but again and again while he chased his losses, and not in cash, which might have been bad enough, but on credit and with a pair of bookmakers who could almost have been called friends of his: the Bourke brothers, my father's fellow parishioners at St Kilian's, on the corner of Chapel Street and McCrae Street in Bendigo.

Dear old St Kilian's! If, during a word-association exercise, someone should fire at me the word
church
, I would fire back the words
St Kilian's
. But that's part of another story. In
Tamarisk Row
, the boy Clement sometimes begged his father for the price of a malted milk so that he, the boy, could enjoy his frothy drink in the shop across the road from the church and could escape the boredom of having to stand in the shade of the date palms in the churchyard while his father and a half-dozen racing men talked endlessly about races already run and races still to be run. Among the half dozen were fictional versions of the Bourke brothers. I have a vague recollection of two ginger-haired, easygoing men. How was I to know, on the morning when my father led me by a roundabout route well clear of St Kilian's to the cathedral in Golden Square, that his sole reason for doing so was that he could no longer face the Bourke brothers? How could I have known, while I idled away my time in the cathedral, that the hero of my radio drama had led me to that place of golden light and soulful music only in order to hide from his bookmakers, the men that he was soon to welsh on?

24.
Mary Christian Murday of the Same Address

I'VE MENTIONED ALREADY
in this book that I've hardly ever enjoyed watching a film. The notion that people reveal their true selves by talking, shouting, rolling their eyes, or otherwise gesturing seems absurd to me, who have tried all my life to use speech and body language in order to conceal rather than reveal. I have long believed that a person best explains himself or herself when writing to a reader, either real or imaginary. Nevertheless, and although I've probably watched fewer films and stage plays than anyone of my age and cultural background, I can still recall a few images that I've watched and I'll admit that those images have been of value to me.

It may have been as long ago as the 1970s when my wife, who did not share my poor opinion of film and the theatre, persuaded me to watch a film version of what had been originally a stage play. The title was
Separate Tables
, and the playwright was, I think, Terence Rattigan. I recall that the plot was intricate—far too intricate for me. The characters were mostly residents of some sort of boarding house or guesthouse. Some, I seem to recall, were singles while others were couples. While the action went forward, all manner of tensions arose among the various characters. Only one resident of the place seemed unaffected by these tensions. This character was a mannish-looking woman who sat alone every morning while the others arranged themselves in different groups according to the subtle dynamics of the play. Whenever the camera picked her up, she was sitting alone and taking no notice of her fellow guests or even of the food that she was eating, and all the while she was putting pencil marks on a newspaper, which the viewer had previously learned was the paper that published form guides every day for every race meeting in Great Britain.

I know nothing of the craft of writing scripts for film or live theatre, but I soon understood that the woman hunched over her form guide was a foil to the main characters. While they were falling in or out of love or forming or breaking down alliances, she was utterly removed from their concerns. She was a marginal character, but she came into her own in a brief scene towards the end. By then, the tensions between the leading characters would have been palpable for a discerning viewer such as my wife. I would have lost the plot long before—literally. The guests were at breakfast, and some sort of confrontation, resolution, denouement, whatever seemed about to take place. But the tension was briefly relieved, as it is sometimes relieved in a play by Shakespeare when a pair of yokels score points off one another before the hero and his antagonist confront each other in the final scene. Just before the climax in the breakfast room, the student of form guides got up to leave—for the nearest race meeting, presumably. As she was leaving, one of the main characters detained her for a moment, perhaps offended by her detachment from the others and their concerns. He said something to her along the lines of ‘Could you not say something kind to Cynthia in her time of turmoil?' or ‘Surely you've sensed this morning the burden that Ralph has to bear?' My plain-faced heroine, for that's what she became for me as soon as she had delivered her reply, waved her form guides in the face of her questioner and said words to the effect of, ‘Give me horses rather than people any day. Horses are so much more predictable!'

Many times, as a young man, I could have wished for no better way of life than was had by the woman punter in Rattigan's play. I could not imagine, perhaps, how I might be freed from the need to work for a living, but I could readily imagine myself doing without the distractions of a wife and family. In 1957, one of the things that woke me out of my brief daydream of becoming a priest was my realising that a feeling of closeness to a mental image of God would never sustain me through a lifetime as a celibate, and yet I was often confident during the next few years that I could do without a girlfriend or a wife if I was able to devote myself wholly to racing. I sometimes tried to weigh up the matter. I would ask myself what was the worst possible experience I could have as a bachelor-racegoer. My most common answer would be that I could think of nothing worse than arriving home after a day of heavy losses—arriving home to an empty flat and having to prepare some sort of meal. But then I would argue that the misery to be endured in such a situation was by no means worse and probably rather less than the misery of learning that a young woman I had been interested in for some time was not in the least interested in me.

The horsey woman in Rattigan's play had not smiled when declaring that she found it easier to forecast races than human behaviour. Nor am I smiling when I write that I got from horse racing during the first twenty-five years of my life more than I ever got from any friendship or courtship. My wife and I were together for a few months less than forty-five years, and I could never doubt today that each of us had a better life than if we had remained single, which had been something of a possibility for both of us when we took up together in our late twenties. Even so, there were weeks and months during those forty-five years when I could not have brought myself to write a sentence such as the previous.

During most of the countless hours that I've spent on racecourses, I've been alone. And yet I've never once felt awkwardly or conspicuously alone at the races as I used to feel at dances or parties or holiday places. If, as a young man, I found myself in the company of an attractive young woman in a place other than a racecourse, I would be at first distracted and afterwards annoyed that I was prevented by a thousand obstacles from knowing more about her. If I came up against the same young woman on a racecourse, I would barely glance at her before getting on with my business and would feel no less a man for having behaved thus.

From my earliest years as a racegoer, there were numerous women among the spectators but few among the participants. For many years, all trainers and jockeys were men, as were most owners. I don't even recall seeing female strappers for many years. Bookmakers were all men and so, too, were most of the throng in the betting ring. No solitary male could ever feel out of place on a racecourse. The men around him might have been lechers or satyrs on other days, but on race days they had the appearance of an order of celibate friars or monks following a religious rule or a motto like that of St Benedict:
Work and pray!

There were also, of course, genuine bachelors, especially among my extended family or other Catholic families of their acquaintance. I was often at the races during my early years with my bachelor-uncle Louis. We sometimes met up with the Goonan brothers, Louis's cousins on his father's side. The Goonans were a family in which the majority of the siblings never married. Dan and Louis Goonan raced horses under the colours Pink, gold cap. My father warned me against the Goonans. He said they were mean and narrow-minded. I strongly suspect that they once turned my father down for a loan, which is what anyone in his right mind would have done. The Goonans
were
stingy, and I disliked them for it, but I admired their stern, celibate way of life.

On the day before the two-day summer meeting at Warrnambool in, I think, the late 1950s, a car travelling from Melbourne to Warrnambool was struck by a train at one of the level crossings on the Princes Highway. The two people in the car were killed. In those days, such accidents were by no means uncommon. Level crossings, even on the busy highway, were marked only with painted wooden posts or with white markings on the road. I might mention here an accident that happened once near Allansford, at Grauers Crossing, one of the most dangerous. A travelling salesman driving alone was struck by a race train on its way back to Melbourne after a Warrnambool meeting. Perhaps I've written sometimes in this book as though racegoers are a mostly virtuous lot or that racing brings out the best in people. If so, then I'll do well to report here that the salesman's suitcases full of samples and supplies, whatever they were, were flung along the railway line after the crash. The train, of course, had stopped. The driver of the car died soon afterwards at the scene, but before he died he pleaded in vain with the dozens of home-going punters who had jumped down from the carriages and were picking up and pocketing the scattered goods.

The first of the two accidents mentioned above was reported in the
Warrnambool Standard
on the following day, which was the first day of the two-day race meeting. The two persons killed had been a man and a woman, both in their fifties. The man was named Rupert Taylor. I've forgotten his middle name. He was described as being a racehorse trainer from Dover Street, Flemington.

Rupe Taylor, as I once heard my father call him, was one of the numerous small-time trainers who struggled then and still struggle today to earn a living from racing. I can never recall any of Taylor's small team winning, although he must surely have won some country races during the time while I was aware of him. I found his colours distinctive and pleasing. They were Orange, red hoops and cap, and I would have liked to commend whoever had designed them. I had never seen Taylor, but when I read of his death I formed an image of a smallish grey-haired man. He was smallish because, like so many trainers then and now, he had formerly been a jockey. He was grey-haired, of course, because he was in his fifties, which for someone of my age at the time seemed old. Taylor had two horses engaged at the Warrnambool meeting. Many another small-time trainer might have towed his horses in a two-horse float but Rupe's horses got safely to Warrnambool, I gather, because they were sent in the care of a horse-transport company. I can't recall whether the horses were scratched or whether, as sometimes happens in such a situation, another trainer saddled them up or was even asked by the owner to take them into his stable.