Something for the Pain (14 page)

The previous sentence is not quite accurate. I had arrived at the races that day with Louis and a man named Joe Rowan, who was a distant cousin of Louis and my father and was on holiday from Sydney. Joe was a married man of about forty years; Louis was about the same age but a bachelor. I was an innocent young man in his late teens. When Louis had explained how Jack Casamento earned his livelihood, he, Louis, had addressed his remarks equally to me and to Joe Rowan. But then, when Louis had reported the next interesting item about the owner-trainer of Pavia, he, Louis, had looked only at Joe and had lowered his voice as though he wanted me not to hear him, although he surely knew that I heard every word. What Louis muttered was that Jack Casamento kept a harem. I would have been too embarrassed to ask what exactly Louis meant, but Joe asked him at once. Louis explained himself, still looking only at Joe and still as though I was not meant to hear. I was surprised to hear my puritanical bachelor-uncle use an expression that I had heard only among my peers. Jack Casamento, so Louis said, lived with a mother and a daughter and was
on
with both women.

When I'm watching a race that I've bet on, I naturally will my own horse to win, although I mostly follow my father's example and never utter a word or a cry during the running of the race. When I'm watching a race without having had a bet, I'm never equanimical or neutral. I'm always anxious on behalf of one or, sometimes, two or three horses owned or trained or ridden by persons for whom I feel an affinity. I've never owned the least share in a racehorse or known more than a handful of racehorse owners. For nearly thirty years, however, I taught general education and public speaking at the School for Apprentice Jockeys that was formerly conducted by the Victoria Racing Club and supervised by members of the panel of stipendiary stewards. During that time, I dealt with dozens of young persons who were later successful jockeys. A few are still riding today. Some are now trainers. I dealt to a lesser extent with the apprentices' masters, the trainers, who were, some of them, prosperous and successful while others seemed to live from hand to mouth. Some of the trainers that I once met are still training today. I've had no official connection with racing for more than twenty years, but I still get pleasure today from the success of a jockey or a trainer that I was on good terms with many years ago. Even so, most of the jockeys and trainers that I wish well or barrack for are total strangers to me. Well, that may be true for the big names of racing, so to call them, whose faces I see only in newspaper illustrations or through my binoculars when I train them on the distant mounting yard at some city meeting. At country meetings, spectators can get close enough to the main actors to hear their every word. At a non-TAB meeting in the remote district where I live nowadays, I can often hear every word of the instructions from a trainer to a jockey before a race and every word of a report from a jockey to a trainer after a race. In short, even though I've been for much of my life a mere spectator at the races, I've dealt enough with racing people or I've spied enough on them to enable me to form preferences: to watch races hoping that my favourite persons succeed.

When I had first seen the stern-faced owner-trainer of Pavia collecting his wads of notes from the bookmakers, I had felt drawn to him at once. I was ready to welcome him into the company of those whose fortunes I followed week after week and year after year in the form guides and results pages of newspapers. I foresaw myself looking in future for the names Pavia or Casamento in the back pages of newspapers and mentally urging on the dark blue and the pink, and the tough-looking man whose colours they were. My uncle's telling me that Jack had become prosperous as a wholesale merchant would only have increased my liking for him. He was no inheritor of wealth but someone who had worked for it. He was at the fruit and vegetable market in Footscray before dawn several days each week. He drove backwards and forwards along the Princes Highway during week after week for year after year. And he knew how to prepare a horse to win at double-figure odds. Go, Jack!

But what was I to make of the keeper of the harem? Should I be investing emotional capital in such a man? Aligning myself with the dark blue and pink, and urging home a horse owned and trained by a public sinner? I can't say that these questions cost me any sleep at the time, but I do remember asking them of myself. My answers would have differed from month to month, even from week to week. My moral compass swung often and wildly during that period of my life. This was not only because I was going through a process that my devout uncle Louis would have called
losing the faith
if only he had known about it. If, as a believing Catholic, I considered the keeping of a harem a breach of the Commandments and a mortal sin, then I could hardly wish for a harem-keeper a successful career on the turf. On the other hand, even during those periods when I considered myself a freethinker or an agnostic or whatever, I found the notion of a mother-and-daughter harem distasteful or even repugnant. My own instinct was to respect or even to fear females. I was not so much inclined to condemn Jack the harem-keeper. Rather, I could not understand what seemed to me his barbarous way of life; I thought his view of the world must be utterly remote from my own.

The second of the other two interesting things that Louis told to Joe Rowan and me was an account of how Jack Casamento had come to be the owner-trainer of Pavia. Louis had heard the story from one of Jack's acquaintances and said he had no reason to doubt that it was essentially true.

Until 1956, the few horses that Jack Casamento had owned and trained had been bought cheaply from small-time owners or trainers like himself. Early in 1956, Jack decided on a new and bold policy. His business had prospered, and he planned to buy a well-bred yearling at the autumn sales. He might have chosen his yearling at the sales in Melbourne or Adelaide, but he was even more ambitious. He obtained a catalogue from the famous Trentham sales, in Wellington, New Zealand, and set about drawing up a short list of possible purchases. His price limit was a thousand guineas or thereabouts. (A guinea was twenty-one shillings or one pound and one shilling. As a unit of currency it was no longer used except at horse sales. I believe the custom was for the company in charge of the sale to take a shilling from each guinea as commission. This would have equalled 4.76 per cent of the sale price.) A thousand guineas was by no means a trifling sum—the average race at a Melbourne meeting in the late 1950s had total prize money of a thousand pounds. Jack studied the catalogue long and hard, so the story went, and compiled his short list. Equal at the top were two colts by the sire Khorassan. One was from a mare named Royal Battle; the dam of the other was named Florida.

The next part of the story had several variations. Depending on who told the story, Jack chose his purchase after looking at the colts themselves, or he decided to let the colt from Florida pass because bidders were few and he supposed he might have overlooked some fault that other buyers had noticed in the animal. Perhaps Jack himself was unable to recall afterwards exactly why he bought the Royal Battle colt for a thousand guineas while the Sydney trainer Tommy Smith bought the Florida colt for seven hundred and fifty. Certainly, Jack would have had no cause to reflect on the reasons for his purchase until at least six months after the sales, when the colt that Jack named Pavia was being prepared for racing and when the colt that had been named Tulloch had won, at Randwick in early October 1956, the first of the thirty-six races that he would win during his illustrious career.

I suppose sometimes that I should have felt an overwhelming pity for Jack Casamento after learning how close he had come to selecting the horse I rank second only to Bernborough from those that have raced during my lifetime. I felt instead a sort of annoyance. How could a shrewd horseman sift through a thick sales catalogue and come within a whisker of choosing a future champion of champions, only to fumble at the last moment? Or was I secretly supposing that God had found a subtle but agonising means of punishing for the rest of his life the keeper of a harem?

I could never forget Tulloch's career, but I've forgotten what became of Pavia after the day when I first saw him win at Warrnambool. I have a vague recollection of his winning a few restricted races in later years. I clearly recall seeing him carry the dark blue and pink in a steeplechase at Flemington towards the end of his career. I'm not sure that he wasn't killed in a jumping race or put down after being severely injured. If that happened, then I would have felt only sympathy for Jack Casamento.

It seems unthinkable now that anyone but the master-trainer Tommy Smith should have had Tulloch in his stable, but I sometimes tried to get my uncle Louis speculating on the subject of what would have happened to Tulloch if he had begun his career with the name Pavia and in the care of Jack Casamento at Warrnambool. Louis had only one answer. ‘Jack would have poisoned him.' Louis meant, of course, not that Jack would have intentionally done away with the potential champion but that, in his eagerness to make a good thing of Tulloch alias Pavia, he would have ruined the horse's health with immoderate dosages of what are called nowadays performance-enhancing substances.

14.
Basil Burgess at Moonee Valley

ONE OF THE
many colloquial expressions that I enjoy hearing or using is the description of some or another man as having short arms and deep pockets, meaning that he pays for his shout or buys a raffle ticket reluctantly, if at all. I've always considered myself a prompt payer and generous with money, and perhaps I am, but I learned at several racecourses during the last months of 1974 that I'm a punter with short arms and deep pockets.

In the early months of 1974, my salary was higher than ever before and higher than it would be until nearly twenty years later, when the college of advanced education where I then worked became part of a university and I became a senior lecturer. In early 1974, I was the assistant editor in the Publications Branch of the Education Department of Victoria. I was second in charge of a staff of about twenty and could expect to become editor in five or ten years, depending on when my boss chose to retire. The work was pleasant enough, but my heart was not in it. Telling twenty people what to do and trying to keep up with my boss, who was driven by a manic energy, left me in no mood to write fiction during my evenings and weekends. I had been writing fiction in my free time for nearly ten years. My first book was on its way to being published, and I had begun a second, but I could not foresee myself keeping up my double life for much longer.

An unlikely solution suggested itself. House husbands, as they later came to be called, were unheard of at that time, but my wife and I decided that I should become one. We were not trying to bring in a new social order; we simply did what suited us both, even though our household income was somewhat reduced. My wife had been confined to the house with our three small sons for four years and wanted to resume her career. I was used to helping with housework and shopping and child minding, and I looked forward to spending the day in a quiet house instead of a stressful office. The new set-up worked well for a few years, until our sons' upbringing began to cost more than my wife's income alone could provide, but that's another story.

I knew better than to expect much money from the sales of my books of literary fiction, but I hoped to earn a modest income from betting—yes, betting on racehorses. Despite my father's dismal record and my own lack of success in earlier years, I still believed I could beat the odds. I had a new approach to punting. Since I had started to bet, in the year after I left school, I had gone to each race meeting with a small sum, hoping to turn it into a large sum. My new approach, in the 1970s, seemed much more businesslike. I would set myself up with a comparatively large betting bank; I would have a few large bets each day; I would expect a profit of only twenty per cent of my turnover. And where was the comparatively large bank to come from? Well, superannuation in those days was not as regulated as it has since become. I had been on the payroll of the Education Department for nearly fifteen years, first as a primary teacher and then as a publications officer, and had had deducted from my salary the maximum permissible amount of contributions to the defined-benefits superannuation scheme of the state government. On my resignation, I would have all my contributions returned to me—not rolled over but paid to me in cash, no questions asked. My wife's father had escaped the Great Depression by finding employment with the Department of Agriculture as a stock inspector and had more reverence for superannuation than the ancient Israelites could have had for manna. If he had learned that I was cashing in my superannuation to use as a racing bank, he would have horsewhipped me. I forget how we kept him from finding out. I was paying for some large life-insurance policies at the time, and we may have lied to him that I used my super to buy more such policies. Anyway, when the Education Department had paid up, there I was with perhaps twenty-five thousand dollars in today's money for use as my racing bank.

I divided the money theoretically into a hundred betting units. I planned to have five bets at each meeting that I attended. I would watch the bookmakers' boards and would back well-supported horses or shorteners, as they were called, at average odds of about five-to-one. I would count on one of my five horses winning, which would return to me a profit of one unit per meeting. I hoped to attend about eighty meetings each year—most of them metropolitan meetings but a few at nearer country courses. (One of our neighbours, a young mother herself, was eager to be paid for minding my sons when I went to the occasional country meeting.) If my estimations were correct, I would earn each year about eighty betting units, or about eighty per cent of my bank. This would be a useful addition to my wife's salary. She, by the way, had no objection to my scheme. I was not even required to explain it to her. She was a spendthrift with no patience for budgets or any sort of investments. She also trusted me. I'd had only trifling bets for as long as we had been together and had managed the family finances prudently. Unlike her father, she hardly understood what a superannuation scheme was.