Something for the Pain (17 page)

I consider myself a controlled alcoholic. Some persons whose lives have been marred by alcohol might consider the phrase an oxymoron and might even be offended by my using it. I first heard it used to describe an expatriate Australian painter who lived out the last part of his long life in Italy. Every day during the last thirty or forty years of his life, the man sipped a measured amount of white wine from early afternoon until his bedtime. He lived well into his eighties. I've always disliked wine. I've drunk whisky or rum when beer was unavailable, but I've always diluted the spirits considerably. My preferred drink has always been beer and, for the past twenty years, my home-brewed varieties. I've seldom enjoyed drinking with large groups in hotels. In my first years as a drinker, the hotels closed at 6.00 p.m. Any beer bought before closing time could be drunk on the premises during the first fifteen—or, was it twenty?—minutes after closing time. Drinkers arranged themselves in so-called schools. Each member of a school bought in turn a round of drinks for the whole school. As closing time approached, those members whose turn to buy was approaching would buy their rounds in advance, so to speak. When the bar closed, each member of a school of four might have in front of him three glasses of beer, all requiring to be downed in the next fifteen minutes or so. In 1962, which is the year when this section of my book is set, I drank nearly every night in Frankston with a group of teachers and others and was often obliged to lie down for an hour after I had returned home from a session of what would now be called binge drinking.

After I was married, I seldom drank in hotels. Until my early middle age I had neither the time nor the money to drink more than a bottle or two of beer of a weekend, and this I drank always at home. After my sons had left home, in the early 1990s, I took early retirement and began to brew my own beer, which has an alcoholic content one and a half times that of standard beers. During the past twenty years, I've drunk a measured amount of home brew during almost every afternoon and evening—mostly alone, I'm not ashamed to report. I've had no illness to speak of since a bout of bronchitis more than forty years ago, and I've had to visit a dentist only once since I left school in 1956. I give myself a good chance of living for as long as that expatriate wine sipper, whatever his name was. As I said, I'm a controlled alcoholic.

I wasn't so controlled in 1962. In that year, I felt as though I had reached some sort of dead end or had painted myself into a corner. The year was my third as a primary teacher. When I had left teachers' college, at the end of 1959, my ambition had been to have several poems or short stories published in literary magazines within the next three years. In 1962, the third of the years was passing and I had had nothing published. Worse, I had written hardly anything. What was wrong with me, I wondered, and while I wondered I drank. And, for the first time in my short career as a racegoer, I began to drink at the races. This was something that my father and Teddy Ettershank considered a sort of degeneracy. But my father had died two years earlier, and who was Teddy Ettershank to me?

I was living and teaching in Frankston at the time. I had joined the Frankston Yacht Club as a social member. I've always hated and feared the sea, and I kept away from the yacht club on their sailing days, but on Friday evenings I got very drunk in their clubhouse and played carpet bowls until I couldn't see straight. On Saturday mornings, still hung over, I withdrew ten or twenty pounds from the State Savings Bank in Frankston (all banks opened on Saturday mornings in that long-lost golden era) and caught the train to Melbourne and whichever racecourse was the site for the meeting of the day. By then I could afford to pay my way into the most expensive of the several enclosures, the paddock. I was respectably dressed in a suit and tie. (Jeans and tracksuits were never seen on racecourses then.) A Saturday program comprised always eight races. My practice was to station myself before the first race in one of the bars and to drink two glasses of beer while I studied the form guide and the race book. I did this before each of the seven later races. Admittedly, the glasses were smaller than the standard glasses served in hotels, but by the end of the day I had drunk more than enough to befuddle the skinny apprentice boozer that I was in my early twenties. What puzzles me most nowadays, when I get up several times in the night to empty my bladder, is how I managed to survive the long train trip home to Frankston every Saturday evening. I owned no car throughout the early 1960s, and no toilets were provided on the suburban trains. The journey from Melbourne to Frankston took an hour, and yet I always survived, with hardly any discomfort, until I reached the toilets at Frankston station.

I was very much a solitary at the races at that time. Dennis Hanrahan was already an assistant judge. Graham Nash was teaching somewhere, I knew not where, in rural Victoria. There would have been many Saturdays when I spoke to no one except the bank clerk who handed me my money in the morning and the bookmakers who took my bets in the afternoon. When I come to think of it, my whole weekend was spent in solitude, apart from my carousing with the yachtsmen on Friday night. On Sundays, I never left my comfortable flat but kept to my desk, sipping beer and trying to write something publishable.

Not surprisingly, I have few memories from the Saturday afternoons when I drank and bet and drank again. My one outstanding memory derives from a day at Flemington in late winter or early spring when I, who have always been ill at ease in front of an audience, took it on myself to pose to a dozen and more strangers, in the little old concrete stand that stood in those days just to the west of the members' stand, the question that gives this section its title.

For some weeks, I had been following a horse named Rio Robin (Dark-blue and light-blue diamonds, orange cap). Its part-time or small-time trainer was F. J. Stent from Flemington. I had backed Rio Robin twice already before the day in question. On each occasion, the horse had been most unlucky and had failed to get a clear run at the leaders in the straight. On the day when I backed him a third time, I had won much money on earlier races. I had backed Rio Robin at about ten-to-one in the last race, and I stood to win on him about forty pounds, or a fortnight's salary. Halfway up the Flemington straight, the horse was midfield but full of running, as they say. He was on the rails and needing to find a way through, just as on earlier occasions. Then the opening came; the horses in front of Rio Robin drifted away from the rails. My horse's rider did not hesitate but drove the horse through the gap. He seemed to me, for a few strides, the likely winner, but then the horses that had drifted outwards drifted back inwards. Rio Robin was severely checked and lost all momentum. The field pressed on to the finish, and my horse, for the third time in three starts, seemed to have been beaten by bad luck alone.

I've never looked for opportunities to make conversation with total strangers—not even when drunk. And yet, on that grey afternoon at Flemington, just after the horses had crossed the line in the last race of the day, I turned to my right and posed, in a loud voice and to a dozen and more men and women around me, all of them, I seem to recall, old enough to have been my parents, my urgent question. I wonder what sort of response I expected. Not only did no one answer me: they all looked studiously anywhere but in my direction and, if I hadn't been too drunk to have made such a subtle connection, their reaction might have reminded me of many an afternoon when some drunk would have been talking to the air around him outside a hotel in Bendigo and I would have crossed in haste to the other side of the street.

I was punished for my folly in a peculiarly appropriate manner. Rio Robin had his next start a fortnight later at Caulfield. When I first saw his name among the entries, I looked forward to backing the horse yet again at good odds and winning back my previous losses and more. When markets were published on the Friday, however, my horse was one of the favourites; and when I backed him on the Saturday, the best price I could get was eleven-to-two. Rio Robin won, but I had only a modest collect. It was as though every person who had heard my question at Flemington a fortnight before had noted the name of the horse I was ranting about; had read the stewards' report in the Wednesday
Sporting Globe
; had learned that the horse truly
had
been a certainty beaten; had told all their friends about the matter until, as the old saying had it, the dogs were barking Rio Robin's name all over Melbourne by the time when the horse next ran and the bookmakers, too, knew all about him.

17.
Palatial, the Dream-Horse

LONG BEFORE MY
wife's final illness, in 2008–09, one of her legs had begun to fail her. We had gone to the races on nearly every Saturday during the late 1980s and much of the 1990s, but towards the end of that decade we had to restrict our movements at racecourses. At Flemington, for example, she spent most of her time at one of the tables on the ground floor of the old Members' Stand. Recalling this, I'm able to say with certainty that I met Pauline D'Alton one Saturday afternoon in the late 1990s. She had taken a seat at the table where my wife and I sat, and had begun a conversation but had not introduced herself. After she had mentioned that she was the trainer of a certain horse that had run in an earlier race, I knew her identity. She was rather older than my wife and myself and, as she told us herself, ready to retire as a trainer. I was eager for her to know that I was by no means ignorant of her history. I told her that I had never actually seen her late husband but that I well recalled his sudden death many years before, when he had been in early middle age. I told her that my father had once told me that the smartest trainer in Melbourne was Alf Sands but that Artie D'Alton was not far behind him. (A. A. D'Alton was always known as Artie.) I let her know that her stable's colours (Yellow, blue sleeves) had been among the first that I had learned as a regular racegoer. We recalled together before we went our separate ways some of the better horses that she and, before her, her husband had trained but I made no mention of Palatial and neither did she. Had I forgotten that Artie D'Alton had been the trainer of my dream-horse? Or, had I thought it inappropriate to talk about prophetic dreams about horses with a hardheaded trainer, especially the widow of shrewd Artie D'Alton?

I'm not a mumbo-jumbo man. I've never been interested in meditation or karma or crystals or special diets, but I know what I know and, although I can't begin to explain what gives rise to dreams, I know that I've often dreamed about something that I've later experienced. I hasten to add that the events are almost always minor. I might dream, for example, that I've been confronted by a snake before seeing in the next day's newspaper a picture of someone with a pet python wrapped around him or her.

For someone who spends much of his waking hours thinking about horse racing, I've had surprisingly few dreams about it. I remember a great many of my dreams, but the only horse-racing dreams that I recall right now are three sets of recurring dreams, plus my dream of Gin Lane winning the Caulfield Cup and my dream of Palatial winning the Melbourne Cup.

The first of my recurring dreams used to come to me in the 1960s and the 1970s. I would be at a country meeting when several tall trees would fall to the ground on the far side of the course during the running of a race, usually when a field of horses was passing beneath them and with serious consequences. I ceased to have this dream after I had read a newspaper report (in the 1970s?) and had seen the accompanying photograph of a stewards' tower that had been brought down during a high wind at Hamilton while a race was in progress. No horses or riders were harmed, but the steward in the tower had had his leg broken.

Spain is a country that has never had any interest for me, but I used to dream that I had gone to a race meeting in Spain for the specific purpose of admiring Spanish racing colours, which I had heard were unlike any others. The only colours that I saw in the dream—or the only colours that I later recalled—were a set that looked from a distance as though they were All brown but turned out, when closely inspected, to be Chocolate-and-brown diagonal stripes. I've never had this dream since I learned, perhaps ten years ago, that a young horse in Sydney was carrying the extraordinary colours of Tangerine-and-orange stripes.

My third recurring dream still troubles me sometimes, and I can't imagine what actual event might bring it to an end. I'm at an important race meeting, and I'm anxious to watch a race that has just begun, according to the on-course sound system. My problem is that the so-called grandstand that I've entered in order to gain a view of the race is not your conventional grandstand with rows of terraced seats overlooking the course but a sort of vast castle filled with dining halls and staircases and gloomy corridors and throngs of people who seem unaware that a race meeting is in progress nearby. Sometimes, after struggling through a press of people, I get a glimpse of the racecourse through a narrow slit in the wall of a tower, but mostly I remain ignorant of what I would most like to know.

Gin Lane was a young horse of average ability when I dreamed, in the late 1960s, that he had won the Caulfield Cup. I doubt whether Gin Lane ever started in the Cup, but his full brother Beer Street won the race in 1970.

The setting of my dream about Palatial was one of those nightmarish and labyrinthine buildings where I struggled for a glimpse of race after race. At one point in the dream, I understood that the Melbourne Cup was in progress but I saw nothing of the race. I did hear someone far off in the crowd announcing that Palatial had won but I saw no official results—no judge's numbers displayed on high and no horses returning to scale.

The year was 1968. My wife and I were still childless and living in a flat in Park Street, Brunswick, overlooking Princes Park. I'd had very little time for reading form guides or race results during this or the previous two years. I was still a primary teacher but I was studying part-time for an arts degree, as was my wife. We seldom went to the races and, because we were saving for a deposit on a house, my bets were few and trifling. When I awoke after my dream about Palatial, I was aware that a horse of that name had raced in Melbourne in recent months but I could not have said whether or not the horse was a stayer or whether it was an entrant in the Melbourne Cup. I learned in time that Palatial was in the stable of A. A. D'Alton and carried the colours White-and-green diagonal stripes, gold sleeves and cap. The horse was a stayer of no more than moderate ability. It had been entered for the Caulfield and Melbourne cups but was among the least qualified of all the entrants and would be lucky to gain entry to either race.