Something for the Pain (10 page)

The Australian Cup was not then what it is nowadays. In 1960, it was still one of the longest feature races in Australia, with a distance of about 3500 metres in today's measurements. The start was at the top of the straight-six course, about three hundred metres behind the Melbourne Cup start. The average field for the Australian Cup included few horses of the sort that contested the Melbourne Cup. Runners in the longer race were moderate stayers and there were even a few hurdlers. My selection in 1960 was a moderate stayer indeed, the gelding Illoura (Black, yellow braces and sleeves).

I had been following the races as best I could during my brief involvement with my second girlfriend. I had marked Illoura as a horse to follow after he had run a disappointing race at Moonee Valley soon after having won convincingly a race for stayers at the same course. I supposed he was being prepared to win again at good odds in a field of average quality, and I was most surprised when I saw his name in the field for the Australian Cup. Bookmakers seemed to share my opinion of his chances; they were offering thirty-three-to-one against him. I was not at all confident but I bet thirty shillings on Illoura at forty-to-one.

I watched the race in exquisite autumn sunshine from high in the old Hill reserve. Illoura was ridden by Frank Treen, who had settled in Melbourne after having been a leading rider in Perth. I respected Treen as a rider but I muttered against him when he took Illoura to the lead early in the race. At the far side of the course, Illoura was ten lengths in front of the nearest horse, and I could not believe he would last the distance. But Frank Treen was a masterly judge of pace. He confused the other riders by varying the speed of his mount, which was what journalists call a plodding stayer. When the field turned for home, Illoura was still ten lengths in front. I waited with dread for the plodder to tire. At the clock tower, Illoura was spent, but when I looked back I saw that the others were no less so. At the winning post, Illoura could hardly lift his legs, but he was still six lengths clear, and the brave plodder had won me the equivalent of four weeks' salary.

I was in my first year as a primary teacher, a temporary assistant at Doveton, a newly built outer suburb of Housing Commission homes on the edge of Dandenong. Conditions at the school were trying for teachers, but the staff were exceptionally friendly and helpful to one another. Few young teachers could afford cars at that time, and the senior male assistant, Leo Dobrigh, saved a young woman and me hours of travel on public transport by picking us up and dropping us off in our respective suburbs, which were on his route. Each Friday afternoon, he parked his late-model Holden outside one of the hotels in the main street in Dandenong. The young woman remained in the back seat, preparing the weekly work program that every primary teacher was compelled to maintain, while Leo and I drank four glasses of beer with Jack McLachlan, the head teacher of Doveton, and Brian Brady, one of the male assistants.

I had grown up knowing nothing of alcohol and had drunk my first glass of beer only a few months before my arrival at Doveton. I was twenty-one, while the youngest of my three colleagues and drinking mates, Brian Brady, would have been at least twice my age. Even four glasses of beer, drunk rapidly on an empty stomach, was enough to make me cheerful and talkative. Not only the beer affected me; by Friday afternoon, I had studied the fields for the Melbourne races on the Saturday and was full of pleasant anticipation. Moreover, Australian Cup Day had been the first of a sequence of winning days. On the third or fourth Friday after Illoura's win, my lack of a girlfriend caused me no feeling of deprivation. Racing and I seemed to have reached an amicable understanding.

On that Friday afternoon, whichever day it was, I must have told my three fellow drinkers that I had no girlfriend. I don't recall having done so, but I recall their discussing with mock-seriousness which of the single women teachers at Doveton would be the most suitable girlfriend for me. They had much fun arguing for and against the suitability of even the middle-aged or the ill-favoured. They settled at last on the young woman who was sitting just then in the rear of Leo Dobrigh's car. Her name was Dorothy Lawler, and she seemed to be about my own age. I had found her pleasant company in the car but had never felt attracted to her or sensed that she found me of interest. The last thing I recall from our time in the bar that afternoon is Leo's suddenly seeming to become serious and his urging me to approach Dorothy, who was, so he assured me, a good-hearted girl who lived with her widowed mother and had no serious boyfriend.

I can give no clear account of what followed, let alone of my reasons for doing as I did. I've drunk a great deal of beer since 1960, with little harm to my health or reputation, but I could wish that I had not said some of the things that I said while drinking or, more precisely, some of the things that I seem to recall having said. I seem to recall from that afternoon while Leo Dobrigh drove Dorothy Lawler and me from Dandenong to Caulfield, where I was dropped off, my being asked how I was going to spend the coming weekend. If I
was
asked this, it must surely have been Leo who asked, his intention being to break down the reserve between Dorothy and myself. If I was
not
asked this, then the four glasses of beer had made me reckless indeed, for I recall my delivering to Leo and Dorothy a short lecture, the title of which might well have been ‘Racing as a Complete Way of Life' and the subject matter of which might well have included such assertions as that a young man who devoted himself to racing was content to rest quietly at home of a Saturday evening and that such a young man got from racing at least as much satisfaction and fulfilment as other young men got from going with other young persons to picture theatres or coffee lounges or dances or parties.

If I never afterwards recalled the exact words of my short lecture, still I recalled that I delivered it in a tone of mock-formality and made needless use of long words. I recalled also that I contrived to address Dorothy Lawler at least once during the lecture and not by her first name, as I usually addressed her, but as
Miss Lawler
. This was not quite as inelegant as it might seem nowadays. Dorothy and I were not long out of teachers' college, where lecturers addressed eighteen-years-old students as
Miss This
or
Mister That
. District inspectors used the same form of address when conferring with teachers they had not previously met. And even teachers from the same school addressed each other thus in the hearing of students. But why did I thus address the girl I greeted as
Dorothy
each morning in Leo's car? More to the point, why did I deliver the lecture in the first place?

Perhaps I was trying to rebuke Leo for his clumsy attempt at matchmaking. Perhaps I supposed that Dorothy just may have been interested in me. (I was as inept then as I am still today at interpreting the language and behaviour of others, especially females.) If so, then my lecture would have been meant to explain to her why her interest was not returned. Or, was I secretly appealing to Dorothy? Was I informing her that I was without a girlfriend, just as she, for the time being, was without a boyfriend, and that she had only to tell me in the car that afternoon, or next week in the school corridor, that she had never been to a race meeting and would like to learn how horse racing could have such an attraction for a person such as myself? Nudge, nudge; wink, wink, as they used to say long ago.

Whatever my motives might have been (and I'm hardly better at interpreting my own behaviour than that of others), my lecture achieved nothing, although Leo never afterwards recommended Dorothy to me. I recall that an awkward silence followed the lecture. If I was embarrassed in front of Leo and Dorothy during later days, my embarrassment would have been short-lived. My position at Doveton was only temporary. I was liable to be moved elsewhere at short notice by the clerks in the teachers' branch of the Education Department, and a few weeks after my lecture I was moved far away indeed. Although I remained a teacher for eight more years and after that a publications officer in the Education Department for five years, I never again saw any of my former colleagues from what I think of as the Illoura period of my life.

10.
Form-Plan and Otto Fenichel

IN THE LONG-AGO
1960s, I knew a man who claimed to have been helped though a troubled period by his faith in psychoanalysis. When I myself was going through such a period, he urged me to read a certain huge book on the subject. I've forgotten the title but I recall the author's name, which was in gilt letters on the dark-green spine: Otto Fenichel. I read several chapters but I recall today only two short passages. One passage described the symptoms of a man with an obsessive-compulsive disorder. He could never walk more than a few paces forward without obeying an urge to look behind him for any beetle that was lying helpless on its back and needing to be set upright. The other passage was the opening sentence of a section on gambling. According to the learned author, the gambler gambles in order to learn whether or not God has forgiven him for his masturbation. This may or may not be so, but it provides me with an excellent opening to a discussion of systematic ways of betting, or systems, as they used to be called for short. If Fenichel or his followers had ever learned how much time and effort I've put into my search for a reliable and profitable betting system, they could only have concluded that I was either the all-time champion Onanist or, at least, the one of all the practitioners of the ancient art who felt the most guilty about it.

I wish I could recall what first led me to investigate betting systems. In my early years as a follower of racing, I tried to pick winners haphazardly, but in 1952, when I was only thirteen, I began recording the recent form of every winner, hoping to discover some recurrent pattern that would help me predict future winners. In all my life, I've never bought a ticket in a lottery or any sort of lotto game with huge prizes. I've always believed the odds to be too much against me. And yet, I still today continue the research that I began as a boy more than sixty years ago; I still spend a few minutes each morning checking the results of the latest betting system that I've devised.

If I were to find my golden goose this year, I would make no effort to profit from it. My wants are simple nowadays, and I live in frugal comfort. If my lifetime of research should be rewarded at last, my only pleasure, apart from my knowledge of God's forgiveness, would come from my leaving the details of my discovery in the folder where I store my Last Will and my instructions for my funeral service. None of my sons shares my obsession with the turf, but all of them would surely be grateful for my leaving them the means for earning a supplementary income.

Even during the few months in late 1958 and early 1959 when I was sure I had found the Holy Grail of punting, I had no plans for conspicuous consumption. I intended to reinvest my winnings until my betting bank was large enough to supply me with a yearly income of two thousand pounds (about one hundred thousand dollars in today's currency). This income would enable me to rent a comfortable flat in Dandenong Road, Armadale; to own a small car; to join a middle-level golf club; and to put together a library of a few hundred volumes of fiction and poetry, along with a select collection of long-playing records. I had been much impressed by a few paragraphs in a feature article in the
Herald
newspaper about the private lives of rails bookmakers. If anyone had discovered the perfect betting system, these men had. So long as they set their books properly and bet equally against all the favoured horses, they could never lose. Those who agreed to be interviewed for the article all chose to remain anonymous and played down the extent of their wealth but freely discussed their interests apart from racing. Many had farms or businesses, yet the man who most impressed me had installed a massive pipe organ in a large, acoustically sound room in his house. He fielded on the rails every Saturday and public holiday but took no other interest in racing. On most weekdays, he spent several hours alone in his chapel-sized room deep among the tree-shaded streets of Toorak, practising his Bach fugues. My way of life would not be quite so austere as that of the bookmaker-organist; I would study each day the newspaper form guides and the results of the previous day's meetings. However, I would attend the races only when I had to back a horse selected by the strict conditions of my lucrative betting method. On other days, if I wasn't on the fairways of Riversdale or Commonwealth, I was in my upstairs study overlooking Dandenong Road, with one of Sibelius's symphonies sounding in the background while I tried to write a poem in the style of Thomas Hardy.

I should explain that my research into betting systems was mostly theoretical. For much of my life I've selected horses according to my own judgement but with a few guiding principles in mind, although nothing resembling the strict rules of the profitable system that I always hoped to find. For example, I bet with moderate success for many years by selecting a horse at single-figure odds to beat the favourite and then backing both that horse and the favourite, so that the favourite would return me my total outlay if it won, while the other horse would show me a profit. My search for the perfect system took place mostly on Sundays or Wednesdays, when I would spread out in front of me the form guide from the previous Saturday together with the results from either the Saturday evening edition or the Wednesday edition of the
Sporting Globe
. These documents gave me what would be called today instant feedback. Did I want to know how I would have fared on the previous Saturday if I had backed only last-start winners quoted at single-figure odds? I had only to list my hypothetical selections and then to learn their fate from the results in the
Globe
. What if I had backed only those horses ridden for the first time by the leading jockey or by one of the three leading jockeys? The results in the
Globe
gave me my answer within minutes. Nor was I so foolish as to suppose that the worth of a betting system or selection method could be assessed from the results at a single race meeting. I kept form guides and
Globes
for months on end. Although I had not then heard the word, I was conducting
longitudinal
studies of each method that I devised.