Something for the Pain (16 page)

Surely I didn't derive all this from my first sight of Sanvo's colours? Probably not, but I was certainly much taken by them, especially when the owner of the colours and the horse had revealed himself as someone of immense patience and not a little cunning: someone who might have won several country races with his capable horse but who chose instead to have the horse run unplaced for month after month in the country so that he, the owner, might back it at outsider's odds in one daring attempt at a city race. On the day of Sanvo's dead heat at Moonee Valley, I began to assemble the first of the details that together comprise what might be called the legend of P. S. Grimwade.

All these things took place nearly sixty years ago, and I can't be sure today of their exact sequence. I'll finish this section by reporting, as they occur to me, my few memories of the career of my legendary figure.

I don't recall Sanvo's winning again during the year after his dead heat. What I next recall is my being at Caulfield on a certain Saturday in September 1958. In those days, two meetings were held at Caulfield in close succession: the first on the Saturday before the Royal Show Holiday and the second on the Thursday of the holiday itself. I was at Caulfield on the Saturday with Uncle Louis, and Sanvo was a fifty-to-one outsider in a field of good city-class horses. I explained to Louis my interest in the horse and its owner. Louis was one of the few persons who shared my interest in such matters, and we each had a small bet on Sanvo. The green and the blue and the white were obscured in the ruck throughout the race; Sanvo finished near the rear. Five days later, on the Show Day public holiday, I was alone at Caulfield. Louis had gone back to Warrnambool. Sanvo was engaged again. This time, the field was even stronger, and he was a rank outsider at a hundred-to-one. It was unusual for any horse to race twice in such a short time, and I should have been suspicious, but I had felt angry and humiliated in front of Louis five days before, after I had spruiked Sanvo to him and the horse had done nothing. I was in no mood to be enthused by Sanvo's chances. I had my standard bet on one of the favoured horses and ten shillings, win-only, on Sanvo on the tote. The field, as I reported, was stronger than the earlier field, but Sanvo seemed to be a completely different horse. He raced with the leaders throughout and fought out the finish with two others. The three passed the post with only a neck between them. The result, as it happened, was a dead heat, but this time Sanvo was not involved. Two very capable horses of those days were equal first: Droll Prince (Orange, white sleeves, red armbands and cap) and Brocken (White, ruby sleeves). A neck behind them, in third place, was Sanvo. According to the
Sporting Globe
of the following week, Sanvo's betting fluctuations on the Thursday had been fifties to a hundred and back to sixty-sixes. This told me that someone, or more than one, had gone along the rails late in the betting and had backed Sanvo to win a great deal of money for very little outlay. The bets had been lost, but not by much and, far from bemoaning the loss of my own piddling sum, I was ashamed not to have put much more on the horse so that I could have felt a solidarity with P. S. Grimwade in his misfortune.

One matter that told against P. S. Grimwade was the naming of his horses. Sanvo was by Sans Tache from Voucher. Paratone and Britain's Pride, to be mentioned shortly, were, respectively, by Paramount from Folkestone and by Great Britain from a mare whose name I've forgotten. I used to regret that the man I so admired seemed bound by the foolish custom of combining in his horses' names details from their parents' names. Perhaps I should have been more accepting and supposed that my admired owner was only acting in character. He had already given away through his expressive colours as much as he cared to give away of himself. Let him hide what was left behind the sort of racehorse names that many a lesser person might have devised. Paratone won a stayer's race at Caulfield one day at odds of twenty-to-one. Britain's Pride was a little before my time, so to speak. When I was in my last year at school, or it may have been a year earlier, the horse won a race at Flemington at fifty-to-one.

I can cite no other long-priced winners that carried the green and white and blue. I can report, however, that Sanvo got his name into the record books as the winner of the Moonee Valley Cup in 1959. He was the best of the Grimwade horses that I saw in action—too good, it seemed, to be restrained for month after month in preparation for a long-priced betting tilt. I seem to remember that Sanvo, during 1959, was placed in several races of good quality. He may even have won such a race in his lead-up to the Moonee Valley Cup. His ability was by now exposed, and he was never again at long odds. I was present when he won the Moonee Valley Cup, and I had only a small bet on him for sentimental reasons. He was one of the favourites.

I have no more facts to report about P. S. Grimwade or his horses. Given that the Grimwade colours were no longer seen on racecourses after the early 1960s, I wonder whether he may have been already an old man when I first became aware of his existence. If this is so, I very much regret that I'll never know how his horses performed when I was too young to be a follower of racing. Perhaps, on some afternoon in the years when I was only beginning to make sense of the sounds that so occupied my father when he sat by the wireless set of a Saturday, a horse owned by P. S. Grimwade achieved at Mentone or Williamstown what Sanvo came close to achieving at Caulfield on Show Day in 1959. I'll never know.

If I was at Moonee Valley when Sanvo won the Cup there in 1959, why did I not watch the trophy presentation and, perhaps, see in the flesh at last my legendary owner? I suspect I wanted to keep in mind the ideal man rather than have in sight the actual man. Or, perhaps I felt sure that P. S. Grimwade would have disdained to attend even such a meeting as included the Moonee Valley Cup and Cox Plate. Perhaps I wanted to think of him as someone for whom racing was better imagined than experienced—someone such as myself. Perhaps I assumed he was just then getting up from his cane chair on the return veranda of his sprawling homestead in the Central Highlands of Victoria. He had heard the radio broadcast of the Moonee Valley Cup, and now he had turned off the radio and was about to mount his hack and to ride out to inspect some of his cattle.

Why the Central Highlands? If I had not obtained evidence to the contrary, I would have envisaged P. S. Grimwade as owning an extensive property in what I consider the centre of the universe, in the quadrilateral bounded by Ballarat, Ararat, Hamilton, and Camperdown in the Western District of Victoria, which is a landscape of plains and low hills and vast skies. I've never felt comfortable when surrounded by steep hills, and I've tried always to keep away from mountains. But the scant evidence available tells me that P. S. Grimwade owned a cattle property somewhere between Broadford and Pyalong, about seventy or eighty kilometres north of Melbourne, in a district that I've never visited. I have a memory of having read once, in the
Weekly Times
, of a clearing sale or some sort of notable event on the property of Mr P. S. Grimwade at High Camp, which, according to my maps, is a district to the north of the Northern Highway not far short of Pyalong. I recall also that the last horse owned by Mr Grimwade before his name and his colours were lost to racing was called Glenaroua. The horse failed to win a race, but its name directs me to another district on my maps, a place about seven kilometres north-east of High Camp and far from any main roads.

I've travelled very little during my long life, but I've always enjoyed poring over maps. The district between High Camp and Glenaroua seems to be close to the watershed of the Central Highlands, which are a continuation of the Great Dividing Range as it peters out in Victoria. My maps show several creeks as having their origins between High Camp and Glenaroua, and a mountain of about five hundred metres in height is shown not far north-west of Glenaroua. I reckon I'm entitled to imagine my racing saint as having inherited old money but without any wish to display it; as having turned his back on Toorak and spent much of his life in a sort of lookout tower or eyrie, from which Melbourne and its surrounding plains are the merest blur of haze to the south; as having devised there his subtly eloquent racing colours; as having planned there his infrequent plunges on long-priced horses; and as having thus provided a man he had never heard of with abundant inspiration.

In the unlikely event that this book should be read by some or another descendant of a man named P. S. Grimwade, and that the descendant should wish to tell me that my account of the man is untrue, inaccurate, preposterous, whatever, I urge that descendant not to waste energy, time, or ink on the matter. Nothing will keep me from revering my saint as he was revealed to me.

16.
Who Saw Rio Robin?

I GREW UP
knowing hardly anything about alcohol. I connected it only with violence. In Bendigo, where I lived for four years of my childhood, our next-door neighbour used to come home drunk on beer of a Friday or a Saturday evening and used to beat up or threaten his wife and children. If I had to walk past one of the many hotels in Bendigo, I was frightened by what seemed to me an angry roar, although it was probably no more than the sound of twenty half-drunk blokes all talking at once. My father, his brothers, and their father were not fanatical teetotallers but drank hardly more than a bottle of beer or a glass of whisky at Christmas, although I've since heard that William Murnane, my great-grandfather, was a problem drinker, as we might call him nowadays. I have only the testimony of the puritanical Murnanes to rely on. Poor old William, or Bill, or whatever they called him, was a dairy farmer in a remote district, many miles from the nearest hotel. Why did he earn a reputation as a boozer? Did he drink a few glasses too many in a Warrnambool hotel during the weekly trip thither by horse and cart? Did he bring home a flask of grog and sip from it sometimes after tea?

I reckon I've drunk more in the last week than my poor ancestor drank in three or four months, but my aunts, his granddaughters, shook their heads at the mention of his name, whereas my grandchildren have never seen me with a glass in my hand. (I have a glass of home-brewed beer beside me now, but my grandchildren are four hundred kilometres away!) If I had to point to a strand of boozers in my ancestry, I'd aim my finger at the Mansbridges. My father's mother was a Mansbridge and, although she would never have let a drop pass her lips, her brothers and her nephews were a thirsty lot.

During the many years when my father bet regularly with illegal SP bookmakers, he would have spent countless hours in hotels. Not all of this time would have been spent in bars. At the hotel in Sydney Road, Coburg, that was his favourite haunt, betting took place in a back laneway well away from the beer taps. But in Bendigo, during some of his boldest years as a punter, my father spent entire Saturday afternoons in hotel bars, surrounded by beer drinkers, while he drank only the occasional lemon squash. Only once did he come home affected by alcohol, although I didn't recognise his condition at the time. I was puzzled when he asked my brother and me three times in about fifteen minutes whether we had fed the chooks and collected the eggs. I was puzzled by his grinning at us while we ate our tea and his telling us several times what a fine family he had. I was even more puzzled by the strange sounds that I heard soon after I had gone to bed. My mother told me many years later that I had heard my father vomiting into the gully trap his evening meal and all the whisky that he had drunk during the afternoon while he was betting on the Melbourne races in one of the hotels of Bendigo. Why did he behave so much out of character on that one afternoon? And why did he make a mess of himself with whisky when he might have drunk beer or shandies? I still wonder sometimes about these matters.

Was it Mark Twain or Ambrose Bierce who defined alcohol as a substance that causes madness in the minds of total abstainers? Catholics were supposed to be tolerant towards alcohol, to say the least, but we had our few campaigners against Demon Drink. I know nothing of their origins, but there flourished during my secondary-school years a body known as the Pioneer Total Abstinence League, if I've recalled their title correctly. In the great days of the church, all manner of leagues and societies and confraternities and sodalities flourished, each with its special aim and each managed and promoted by one or another religious order. I gather that the total abstinence body had been entrusted to the Society of Jesus. Certainly, a Jesuit named Dando was the front man, so to speak. He visited schools and preached at confirmation ceremonies, always with the aim of having his hearers pledge themselves to a lifetime of abstinence from alcohol. I seem to recall that those who thus pledged were given a colourful certificate and a lapel badge. I moved so often from school to school as a boy that I was fifteen before confirmation caught up with me. I was confirmed by Archbishop Simonds, the coadjutor to Daniel Mannix, one Sunday afternoon in 1954 in Saint Joseph's Church, Malvern, which was full to the doors for the occasion. Father Dando, S. J., was given his timeslot and preached briefly but forcefully. Alcohol, he told us, was one of God's gifts and in itself neither good nor evil. Unfortunately, a great many people drank alcohol to excess, bringing harm to themselves and others and, of course, sinning mortally. Our lifetime of abstinence would make reparation to God for the sins of the abusers of alcohol. He urged all of us about to be confirmed to recite after him the words of the Pioneer League's pledge and, of course, to honour the pledge for the rest of our lives. I forget how we were to obtain afterwards our certificates and lapel badges, but no doubt he explained this at the time. Such was the volume of sound when the pledge was recited that every child in the church might have been swearing off the grog for life—every child except myself. As I wrote earlier, I knew hardly anything about alcohol. Drinking played no part in any of my frequent daydreams of the future. And yet, I did not take the pledge, perhaps because I've always avoided involvement in mass movements or demonstrations, or perhaps because I thought it unfair that I had to apologise to Almighty God for Great-grandfather William's occasional excesses. Surely most of those in the church that day became drinkers in later years, but they would have been less fortunate than I. Whenever, as a novice drinker, I woke next morning in misery, my remorse would have been only on account of the quantity I had drunk on the night before. They would have suffered in addition from the shame of having broken their childhood pledge.