Something for the Pain

by Gerald Murnane

  The first race on Derby Day in 1956 was the Wakeful Stakes for three-years-old fillies. It was contested by better-than-average fillies being prepared, most of them, for the Oaks Stakes on the following Thursday. The favourite, at very short odds, was In Harmony (Green and yellow hoops), trained locally by Stan Murphy. My father and I had only just arrived in the betting ring when he grabbed my elbow and hissed at me to follow a certain man who had just brushed past us and to learn which horse the man was going to back with the several ten-pound notes that he held in his hand. If the reader wonders why my father himself did not follow the man, then the reader has still not understood my attempts to describe how it was in the Great Age of Racing, which had begun nearly a century before the day when my father told me to spy on Alf Sands and which, had we only known it, was about to end within the next decade. My father was vain and had an inflated sense of his own place in the world, but at the races he truly did have the appearance of a smart man, of someone in the know. Even I, still a schoolboy, knew that if my father had followed Alf Sands, then Alf, being at least as smart as my father, would have got wind of it and would have put his money into his pocket and lost himself in the crowd.

  And so, I followed Alf, as I’ll call him hence, to the rear of the ring, where I observed him put his thirty pounds, win-only, on a filly named Sandara (Red, black spots) at the odds of thirty-three-to-one. In fact, the bookmaker, following accepted custom, rounded off the bet. Alf stood to win a thousand pounds for his thirty pounds. I estimate the value of the outlay in today’s currency to have been at least fifteen hundred dollars and the value of the winnings, if the bet succeeded, to have been at least fifty thousand, and I still marvel at how bets of that size were considered modest indeed in 1956 and could be placed with no fuss with any of the lesser bookmakers at the rear of the ring.

  I reported Alf’s bet to my father, and we consulted the race book in order to learn what possible connection existed between the outsider Sandara, which was trained at Flemington by a man named Burke, and Alf, who managed his stables at far-off Epsom, in Mordialloc. The connection was not hard to find. Sandara was to be ridden by Alan Yeomans, a leading jockey who had been (he may have been still—I don’t remember) apprenticed to Alf. Now, in those days, the Code of Racing, so to call it, had as its first commandment ‘Thou shalt not take the Stable’s market.’ The commandment acknowledged that the owner and trainer and stable followers of a horse with a good winning chance had first entitlement to the best of the odds bet about the horse. Any outsider happening to know of the horse’s ability and daring to alert the bookmakers with an early rush of money would reduce the odds available to the stable and would thereby commit racing’s worst crime. Sometimes a jockey would be in a position to commit this crime. He might be engaged to ride the horse although he was a freelance unconnected with the stable. In all my years as a follower of racing, I heard of only three instances of a jockey’s getting his own money on at top odds, being found out, and being afterwards punished. (Jockeys, of course, are prohibited from betting but who can police their betting through proxies?) Their punishment was severe indeed. Word of their crime was soon all over Melbourne, if not Victoria; their telephones stopped ringing; their careers were as good as over. My father and I understood at once why Alf was backing Sandara and why he was doing it on the outer edges of the ring. The jockey had passed on certain information to Alf, who could act on it but only with the utmost discretion. Alan Yeomans took Sandara to the lead soon after the start, and the filly was never in danger of being beaten. My father won a hundred pounds on the race with an outlay of only three.

  I can report little else about the actual Alf Sands but much about the figure of that name who was one of the demigods in my private mythology of racing. I recall the afternoon when my father made a special trip to Caulfield after having heard from someone he trusted that the Sands stable was going to back one of several horses of theirs engaged that day. My father had no trouble identifying the horse when the time came. Pageoptic (some or another combination of yellow, green, and purple) had been performing only moderately for months past on provincial tracks, but was backed from sixteen-to-one into ten-to-one and won handsomely, and my father arrived home with his pockets bulging—metaphorically, if not literally.

  One day in 1958, I read a newspaper report of a successful plunge at Werribee on a Sands-trained horse named Beau Conde (some or another combination of purple, yellow, and red). After the race, a woman had collected the winnings. She had gone from bookmaker to bookmaker, putting rolls of banknotes into a briefcase.

  I have reported only three of Alf Sands’ many achievements, but these should be enough for my purposes. I have believed for most of my life in my private legend of Alf Sands, by which I mean that I have believed in a mythical man able to prevail against the odds. Sometimes his stable commissioners stride past one after another rails bookmaker, challenging each to risk the most he dares on a horse at long odds and with moderate form. At other times, the man himself lurks at the rear of the betting ring, looking to profit modestly from information obtained in the utmost secrecy. This man may have the appearance of the man that my father pointed out to me at Flemington in 1956, but much about him is other than factual. And so, A. R. Sands the demigod, as I call him, may have the sandy hair and the alert expression of the man that I followed through the betting ring, but whereas the man who backed Sandara had a wife and at least one child, my hero is unencumbered by domestic concerns. In his private life he resembles Jack Holt, a renowned trainer of the 1920s and 1930s, who became known as the Wizard of Mordialloc on account of his many successful betting coups. (It was a coincidence that both my hero-trainers had their stables at the same racecourse.) Holt was a lifelong bachelor who lived simply with his two unmarried sisters as housekeepers and companions. He had been born into poverty but amassed a fortune, most of which he bequeathed to charity.

  Worshipping a demigod is rather like being in love—not the sort of love depicted in films or described in romance novels but the irrational, obsessive passion that has sometimes taken hold of me and that caused me to think for many years that I was unique, until I learned otherwise from reading the fiction of Marcel Proust. The worshipper of a demigod, far from approaching the object of worship, hangs back, keeps at a distance, remains for the time being unknown. For months, or even for years, it is enough for the worshipper to know that the demigod exists and is available for observation. During this period of preparation, the worshipper has to learn all that can possibly be learned about the demigod’s whims, preferences, beliefs, whatever comes under the heading of way of life. At the same time, the worshipper has to change, to improve, and to become worthy of the notice of the demigod at some fortunate time in the far future. Perhaps I exaggerate, but I can recall myself in late 1957 and early 1958 noting the details of every race start of every horse trained by Alf Sands. I had set myself the impossible task of learning from a longitudinal study of his horses’ careers how to predict when he was about to launch a betting plunge on one or another of them.

  I recall a day in 1958 when I absented myself from the teachers’ college that I was obliged to attend daily. I travelled by bus to the Redan racecourse (Ballarat had two racecourses in those days—Dowling Forest and Redan). I was confident that one of the two Sands horses engaged that day would be well backed and would win. I even had the vague and absurd hope that one of the trusted stable punters, or even Alf himself, might see me collecting my modest winnings after the race and might be so impressed by my sagacity as to make himself known to me. (From this may be learned one of the several great differences between myself and my father, who were driven in opposite directions by our obsession with racing. He bet boldly and thrust himself into the company of the insiders, the smart men that he so admired; I bet timidly and dreamed about my admired characters from afar.) Nothing of the sort happened, and Alf’s horses finished well back after having drifted in the betting.

  At the height of my infat
uation with A. R. Sands and his ways, I noted that he had an entrant in the Melbourne Cup. This was in 1957, when I worked for a few months as a junior clerk, filling in time before I could begin my course at a primary teachers’ college. The man at the next desk was named Martin Dillon. He will be mentioned in another section of this book. He too was a racing tragic, although the expression had not yet been devised at that time. He had a great respect for Alf Sands but I could not persuade him that Alf’s horse was in the Cup with a genuine chance, as a racing journalist might have put it. Mr Dillon, as I called him (he was white-haired and sixtyish; I was eighteen) tried to explain to me that most owners of racehorses would be proud to have a horse good enough merely to compete in the Melbourne Cup and that the owners of Alf’s horse were surely no exception. The horse was named Carbea (its colours will be mentioned below); it had been running unplaced in recent country events; and its odds were a hundred-to-one. I did not claim that Carbea could win but I had convinced myself that it must have been much better than its form suggested if Alf Sands had approved of its being entered in the Cup. I bet Mr Dillon a pound (one-eighth of my weekly wage) that Carbea would finish in the first third of the field. In racing parlance, Carbea never flattered at any stage. He finished seventeenth of nineteen, and Mr Dillon said he had never earned a pound more easily.

  Something else that Marcel Proust, forty and more years before my birth, discovered about lover-worshippers: they change their own likes and preferences to match those of their idols. I had been evaluating racing colours for some years before I became a devotee of Alf Sands. At no time had the colours gold and red appealed to me until I learned that the colours of the Sands stable were Gold, red stars and cuffs. It required some effort of the imagination (I would have preferred my hero’s coat of arms to have been more muted and subtle), but I came to approve of the rich gold and the fiery red as denoters of accumulating wealth and a defiance of convention. I even found an admirable contrariness in the fact that the background was gold and not the stars themselves, as might have been expected.

  Another fact about Alf that I accommodated after some early difficulty was his connection with the city of Grafton, in northern New South Wales. As a boy, I had settled on what would be my ideal landscapes for the rest of my life: the green and mostly level countryside of south-western Victoria. Even then, I had developed what would become a lifelong dislike of travel. If, for some reason, I had been obliged to leave the state of Victoria, I might have endured a move to Tasmania or New Zealand but to nowhere else. Queensland, and even New South Wales, seemed subtropical and alien places, but I learned by some or another means that Alf Sands and his family often spent the winter in Grafton, taking a few horses with them and racing them locally. Perhaps I was helped to accept this by my learning that jacaranda trees abound in Grafton. At that time, I supposed that my own racing colours ought to be partly lilac or lavender or mauve. Perhaps the jacarandas of Grafton were not even in bloom during Alf’s sojourn there, but I saw him often as walking his horses of a morning or afternoon through an intermittent shower of blossoms of one of my favourite colours, and I forgave him any bafflement he might have caused me by his travelling northwards.

  From the 1960s onwards, the career of the actual A. R. Sands might be said to have levelled out or even declined. Heavily backed horses might be comfortably beaten into second or third place when, in earlier years, they would either win or be narrowly beaten. My father, who was no longer alive to witness the gradual decline of the man he had once called the smartest trainer in Melbourne—my father might have said that the elderly Alf had lost his touch, but I supposed that my hero was no longer driven as in earlier years. Like Jack Holt, he would have invested much of his winnings in real estate and shares; he no longer depended on racing for his livelihood.

  When last I saw his name in print, A. R. Sands was training an occasional winner in Brisbane, which is a place I have never felt the least inclination to visit. I assume that he died there long ago, but the ‘he’ of this sentence is the actual A. R. Sands. The demigod of that name, like the imams of certain Islamic sects or like a prophet of the Old Testament whose name I’ve forgotten, has gone into occultation and will one day come again to lead his followers in the ways of righteousness.

  7. Miss Valora and Pat Tully

  IN 1958 AND 1959, I gave more of my time to racing than I had given before or have been able to give since. Those were the two years when I was aged nineteen and twenty and a student at a primary teachers’ college. They were also the last years when I lived with my parents and the last years before I began to drink alcohol. I had ample free time. My training course demanded little of me, and I had no girlfriend or social life. My parents didn’t even have a television set. I spent most evenings in my room reading. Occasionally, I tried to write poetry. Early in the week, I read what might be called, for convenience, literature. On Thursday and Friday evenings, after the fields for the Saturday races had been published, I read form guides. On Saturday evenings, after the races had been run, I brooded over the results, trying to learn from my successes and failures.

  The years mentioned were the only years when I tried to pick winners after having taken into account every available bit of information about every horse. In another section of this book, I explain my lifelong interest in so-called systems or betting methods. One of the attractions of that way of betting is that it demands little time, and for most of my life I’ve struggled for the time that I would have liked to devote to racing. On those long evenings in 1958 and 1959, however, in my room in Legon Road, South Oakleigh, I treated every race as a unique event and believed I could predict its outcome if only I weighed up every contributing factor or, at least, every factor that I was aware of.

  During the years mentioned, I was also something of a conspiracy theorist, perhaps too much influenced as a boy by my father’s reports of the doings of the smart men of his acquaintance. I believed in what I later took to calling the paranoid theory of racing. According to this theory, every favoured horse that fails to win has been deliberately prevented from doing so and every outsider that wins, far from surprising its connections, has brought to fruition a detailed plan devised months earlier. As a believer in this theory, I was more likely to select and to back longer-priced horses than favourites. I was also obliged, while watching races, to look out for horses being ridden coldly, as my father would have put it. If, towards the end of a race, my own fancy was on the way to winning, or, more likely, if I could see that my horse had no chance of winning, I would look at the bunch behind the placegetters, hoping to see a horse that was just having a run, which was another euphemism of my father’s.

  I was looking thus behind the leading horses in the last race at Caulfield on a cold afternoon in either late August or early September 1958 when I saw Miss Valora (Red, white quarters and sleeves). My vantage point at Caulfield in those days was the unroofed top deck of the huge red-brick grandstand in the Guineas enclosure. (Both the grandstand and the enclosure have been long since done away with.) From where I stood, I looked down on the horses as they passed the furlong marker, about two hundred metres from the winning post. The rider of Miss Valora, the capable but unfashionable Ian Saunders, had moved the mare to the outside of the field in order to give her a clear run at the leaders, or so it might have appeared to a watcher in the main grandstand near the winning post. Looking downwards, and having a rear view of the horses as they approached the post, I saw that Ian Saunders was making only a token effort to urge his mount forward. He flapped his elbows and bobbed his head, but his legs were motionless and he made no use of his whip. If the stewards had questioned him afterwards, Ian Saunders might have said that his mount was tiring, but even I could see that she was going at least as strongly as those around her. If Miss Valora had been ridden hard, she would have gone close to winning but she finished mid-field, and I had no doubt that this was where she had been intended to finish.

  The odds bet against Miss Valora on t
hat day at Caulfield were about fifteen-to-one. If her connections backed the mare at her next start, which I supposed was the plan, they might get twice those odds, though this, of course, did not improve her chance of winning. I had previously followed horses with form like Miss Valora’s but not always profitably. On the cold afternoon at Caulfield, I merely added the mare to my mental list of horses to be backed at their next start.

  During all the years when a public holiday was observed in Melbourne for the Royal Show, a well-attended race meeting was held at Caulfield on that day, which was a Thursday in late September. On the Wednesday before that meeting in 1958, I was approached by a fellow student at the teachers’ college, a young man named Lawrie Quinlan. I hardly knew Lawrie, but he was a friendly, outgoing fellow and I could not refuse the favour that he asked of me. Lawrie was going to the races at Caulfield next day. He was taking a young woman student from our college. It would be their first outing together. Her name was Pat Tully.