Something for the Pain

by Gerald Murnane

  12. Orange, Purple Sleeves, Black Cap

  MANY YEARS HAVE passed since I gave up watching films. Even as a young man, I was beginning to tire of their complicated plots, their too-clever dialogue, and the soulful stares of the leading actors. On a certain rainy afternoon in the late 1950s, however, I travelled alone on a suburban train into central Melbourne to watch an English film called The Rainbow Jacket. The plot was improbable, to say the least, and the acting was unconvincing, but I considered my long trip worthwhile. A few days before, I had read, in a lukewarm review, that the film, which was in Technicolor, included footage of actual races on English racecourses. As it turned out, the actual scenes lasted only a few minutes but I got from them what I had hoped to get: I had seen for the first time the details of a few sets of the racing colours of England. The appearance on the screen of each set of colours was so brief that I could recall afterwards not one complete design. I remembered only glimpses of details: a cap with hoops of bottle-green and lilac, perhaps, or the striking X-shape on a primrose or canary ground of chocolate-brown crossed sashes, as I would have called them, although the English call them, so I learned much later, cross belts. I recalled only a jumble of such details but they confirmed what I had suspected since I had begun to study racing colours ten years before: that Australian colours were generally dull and predictable, whereas English colours, even allowing for their being unfamiliar to me, had an extraordinary variety and were, in general, more distinctive or assertive than those worn in Australia. That word assertive may seem odd in its context, but I’ll explain later my use of it.

  Perhaps twenty-five years after I had watched The Rainbow Jacket, I was loitering in High Street, Armadale, one of the fashionable shopping precincts in Melbourne’s inner south-east, while my wife was looking through clothing stores. We had not been to Armadale for several years, and I was wondering whether I might find a bookshop among the upmarket shopfronts. In the arcade near the railway station I found not just a bookshop but one dedicated to books and prints with horses as their subject matter. I went inside, walked past the many shelves of books about show horses, equestrian events, that sort of thing, and found the horse-racing section. The proprietor, or whoever he was, asked if I was looking for anything in particular. This sort of question usually irritates me, but something about the man prompted me to confide in him. It’s a lonely life sometimes, being obsessed with horse racing and having no one to share your obsession with, and I was hoping, perhaps, that the man had read some of the books he dealt in and had been affected by them. I told him I had a fair-sized horse-racing library at home but that it had always lacked a certain sort of book—a book that probably didn’t exist, even though I often dreamed about it. Yes, I told the man, I had this dream that I would one day walk into an unfamiliar bookshop and would find on an obscure shelf a massive volume containing illustrations of thousands of sets of racing colours, preferably but not necessarily from England. The man, so it turned out, had a liking for the dramatic. While I was talking, he did a sort of sideways shuffle towards me. Still looking attentively into my face, he reached a hand up to a shelf behind my head. When I had finished speaking, he held out for my inspection a heavy volume of about A4 size with a plain-looking dark-green cover. He asked me off-handedly whether this was the sort of book I had in mind.

  The book is beside me now, as I write. I paid fifty dollars for it in the early 1980s. If the price had been a thousand dollars, I would have put it on layby and would have bought no other books until I had saved up for it. The title is The Benson and Hedges Book of Racing Colours, and the publisher is the Jockeys’ Association of Great Britain. The book was published in 1973. The story behind its publication is told in the preliminary pages. It seems the Jockeys’ Association came up with the idea as a fundraiser for their Injured Jockeys’ Fund. The makers of Benson and Hedges cigarettes paid for production costs. The owners of more than nine thousand registered sets of racing colours gave permission for their colours to be reproduced in the book. How many copies were sold or how much money went towards helping injured jockeys I’ll never know. Nor will the persons who brought the book into being ever know how much satisfaction I’ve derived from it.

  The book fell open just now at pages ninety-four and ninety-five. Fifty-six sets of colours are arranged before me. Among them are those of Mr P. C. Evans: Mauve and pink chevrons, mauve cap. I learn from the opposite page that Lord Fairhaven’s colours are Copper, silver hoop, armlets and cap. I’ll try another page…I learn from page 236 that Capt. C. R. Radclyffe’s colours are Dark blue, grey sash, collar, cuffs and cap, while Mr Mohammad Rafique’s colours are Black, old-gold sash, sleeves and hooped cap. So what? the reader may be asking. Why should it matter that someone in England forty years ago chose this or that design for his or her colours?

  There are people, so I’ve read, for whom numerals or letters of the alphabet have each a different colour. In Remembrance of Things Past, by Marcel Proust, the narrator associates the vowel sounds in certain place names with distinctive colours or shades. I am someone for whom each shade or colour has a rudimentary quality of the sort attributed to persons, while combinations of colours bring me hints of personalities. Surely many people are as fascinated by colour as I am—if not by racing colours. I suspect my interest in colour is linked to my having no sense of smell. I have trouble sometimes convincing people of this, but I have never smelled any sort of odour. I have held under my nose flowers said to be rich in fragrance and detected nothing. I once sat calmly reading in a room that was filling with gas after my saucepan had boiled over and had put out the flame on my stove. When I hear or read about odours, I see in my mind colours. The odour of a red rose is red; the smell of gas is a bright blue. I used the word assertive in an earlier paragraph. For me, each colour or combination of colours asserts something. To put it simply: for as long as I can remember, I’ve believed that colours are trying to tell me something.

  Racing colours for me are not unlike national flags or heraldic coats of arms. The colours of many a flag are intended to suggest the hopes or beliefs of the nation it represents or, sometimes, landscapes or waterways. Likewise, coats of arms often speak of the history or of the achievements of their bearers. My interpretations of racing colours might seem arbitrary or fanciful to many but they have their own consistency—while my beliefs about colour have grown more complicated over time, the basics were established during my childhood.

  The first colours that I saw were those of the trainer of harness horses Clarry Long, who was mentioned, along with his colours, in an earlier section. The first set that I handled were those carried by a horse named Zimmy that my father owned and trained for a few months in Bendigo, in the mid-1940s. My father, who was mostly short of money, had scrounged the colours from someone who no longer needed them and had registered them in his own name. They appeared in race books as Yellow, purple armbands and cap, but according to my strict rules in these matters they should have been described as Yellow, violet hooped sleeves and cap. I enjoyed the feel of the fabric and I admired the way it was stretched over the buttons on the jacket, but I was less attracted to the colours and design than I had been to Clarry Long’s brown with pale-blue stars and, although I have no memory of it, I feel sure that I must have used my school pastels sometimes to design jackets and caps of various arrangements of brown and pale blue, wondering as I did so why the two colours together affected me as they did.

  The first illustration of racing colours that I saw was on a small glossy poster that fell out from between the pages of the Leader, a long-defunct weekly magazine produced by the publishers of the Age as a rival to the Weekly Times. The poster celebrated the achievements of Bernborough and showed the big bay horse with jockey up and wearing the colours of Azzalin Romano, who owned Bernborough late in his career. This was perhaps the first of many instances in my life when I’ve been much more affected by an illustration of something or a written account of something than by the thing itself. This
was in the 1940s, when coloured illustrations often seemed more like paintings than reproductions of photographs, and the rich tints of the poster affected me much more than had the sight of Clarry Long’s jacket or the feel of Zimmy’s yellow and violet.

  Mr Romano’s colours were Orange, purple sleeves, black cap. Now, even though Bernborough is my all-time-favourite horse, I maintain that I would have been drawn to the orange and purple and black no matter what horse had carried them. Many years after both Bernborough and Mr Romano were dead, the colours were re-registered in the name of Sir Tristan Antico, like Romano a successful businessman of Italian descent. Sir Tristan owned some very good horses but many moderate performers also. Almost every week at the races I saw his colours going around, as they say, and I never failed to admire them and to feel again some of the attraction that they had for me long before. Part of the attraction comes from the simple tripartite design. There are no spots or checks or diamonds clamouring for attention—only three zones of uniform colour, each quietly influencing the appeal of the other. At the risk of baffling, or even amusing, some readers, I will try to put into words my reaction to the colours. I associate the orange and the purple and the black with quiet confidence, with dignity, and with unshakeable resolve.

  Only one other set of colours has affected me in somewhat the way that I’ve been trying to describe. I never actually saw the colours; I only read them from a race book. In the 1950s, when most colours in Victoria were dull and predictable, a horse named Nitro was entered at a meeting that I attended at Warrnambool. The horse was scratched from its race, and I don’t recall hearing of it again or of any other horse with the same colours. I owned a set of coloured pencils by then and used them often to illustrate Nitro’s colours and to ponder over them and delight in them: Grey, orange sleeves, red armbands and cap.

  Nitro’s were far from being the only colours that I illustrated with coloured pencils. All through the 1950s, and at intervals since, I’ve felt a need to produce coloured miniatures of actual sets of colours that I’ve seen or read about or of sets that I myself have designed. In the early years, I had no other motive than to see in front of me and to enjoy the immense variety of racing colours, whether actual or imagined. In time, however, I understood that I was engaged in a serious task: I was searching for my ideal colours, for the unique combination that could represent me to the world. I’ve preserved most of the many hundreds of colours that I tried on, as you might say. In early years, I strove to be original. Many of my designs used diagonal stripes, which were extremely rare but later became almost fashionable. If Pablo Picasso went through a Blue period, I once went through a green-and-blue period. Like diagonal stripes, green and blue were rarely seen together although, like diagonal stripes, they later became widely used. In fact, I would have gone through many more periods than did Picasso before I settled, nearly thirty years ago, on the combination of brown and lilac. Those are my colours to this day, but I have never yet settled on a satisfactory design.

  I described the task as serious, and I do take it seriously. I’ve devoted myself to horse racing as other sorts of person devote themselves to religious or political or cultural enterprises, although I hope I can still make a joke at my own expense. I read once that certain musical compositions (by Bach? by Beethoven? I forget) sounded like the efforts of the human soul to explain itself to God. If ever I find my perfect combination of brown and lilac, I’ll feel as though I’ve thus explained myself. But I seem destined never to find my perfect set of colours. Is this because I’ve deluded myself for most of my life? Are racing colours not half so eloquent as I’ve always believed? Or, is my soul too much of a mess for explanation?

  13. Pavia and Tulloch

  ACCORDING TO MY fifty-years-old Times Atlas of the World, Pavia is a town or city about forty kilometres south of Milan. The same name, Pavia, belongs also to a dot on the map about ninety kilometres east of Lisbon. However, when a man named Jack Casamento calls one of his horses Pavia we can surely assume that he wants to commemorate the Italian rather than the Portuguese place.

  Pavia (Dark-blue-and-pink diagonal stripes) first came to my notice when he won a restricted race at a summer meeting at Warrnambool in the late 1950s. The horse’s form before the race had been moderate, and he had started at about twelve-to-one. About twenty minutes after the race, when the placegetters and the also-rans had all been returned to their stalls, I saw a swarthy grey-haired man collecting a wad of ten-pound notes from a rails bookmaker. I followed the man and saw him collect a similar wad from each of two other bookmakers, and I had no doubt that I was watching the owner-trainer of Pavia. I’ve always enjoyed whatever glimpses I could get of the ways of racing folk, and so I followed Jack Casamento and watched from afar while he and a stable hand rubbed down the horse Pavia, packed up their gear, and then led the horse out towards the car park. Jack’s natural expression seemed to be a scowl, and I decided he would have been a tough man to deal with, both on and off the racecourse.

  My father’s younger brother Louis, who was mentioned in an earlier section, lived in or near Warrnambool all his life. I learned from him later that day that Jack Casamento had made his money as a wholesale dealer in fruit and vegetables. Several times weekly, he bought a truckload of greengroceries at the big wholesale market in Melbourne, drove the stuff to Warrnambool, and then sold it there to greengrocers and mixed businesses. Louis then announced two other interesting things about the owner-trainer of Pavia.

  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 m
eeting. 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.