I Own the Racecourse!

by Patricia Wrightson

  PATRICIA WRIGHTSON, one of Australia’s most eminent writers for children and teenagers, was part of the vanguard that established our literature for children: not only in Australia but around the world.

  She was born at Bangalow, near Lismore on the New South Wales north coast, in 1921 and grew up between the two world wars, developing a spiritual connection to the landscape around her that later informed all her writing. During World War II she worked in a munitions factory in Sydney—the city that would provide the setting for one of her most popular books, I Own the Racecourse!—married and had two children. But the union did not last and Wrightson moved back to northern New South Wales, where she worked as a hospital administrator. There she began to write, and later became the editor of the NSW School Magazine.

  Wrightson’s first novel, The Crooked Snake, was named the Book of the Year by the Children’s Book Council of Australia, and she went on to receive the highest national and international honours for her writing: the Hans Christian Andersen Medal, the Dromkeen Children’s Literature Foundation Medal, a further three Children’s Book Council Book of the Year awards and an Order of the British Empire for her most famous work, The Nargun and the Stars, among others. In 1988 the New South Wales Premier named a prize in her honour.

  Patricia Wrightson died in 2010, aged eighty-eight, having written more than twenty-five books and inspired countless authors.

  KATE CONSTABLE is a writer for children and young adults. She was born in Melbourne but spent much of her childhood in Papua New Guinea. Her 2011 novel, Crow Country, won the Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year (Younger Readers) and the Patricia Wrightson Prize in the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards.

  ALSO BY PATRICIA WRIGHTSON

  The Crooked Snake

  The Bunyip Hole

  The Rocks of Honey

  The Feather Star

  Down to Earth

  An Older Kind of Magic

  The Nargun and the Stars

  The Human Experience of Fantasy

  Night Outside

  Journey Behind the Wind

  A Little Fear

  The Haunted Rivers

  Moon-Dark

  The Song of Wirrun (a trilogy)

  Manmorker

  Balyet

  The Old, Old Ngarang

  The Sugar-Gum Tree

  Shadows of Time

  Rattler’s Place

  The Water Dragon

  textclassics.com.au

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © Patricia Wrightson 1968

  Introduction copyright © Kate Constable 2013

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published by Hutchinson Junior Books 1968

  This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2013

  Cover design by WH Chong

  Page design by Text

  Typeset by Midland Typesetting

  Printed in Australia by Griffin Press, an Accredited ISO AS/NZS 14001:2004

  Environmental Management System printer

  Primary print ISBN: 9781922147028

  Ebook ISBN: 9781922148063

  Author: Wrightson, Patricia, 1921–2010.

  Title: I own the racecourse! / by Patricia Wrightson;

  introduction by Kate Constable.

  Target Audience: For children.

  Series: Text classics.

  Subjects: Children with mental disabilities—Juvenile fiction. Children’s stories, Australian. Racetracks (Horse-racing)—Australia—Juvenile fiction. Australia—Social life and customs—20th century—Juvenile fiction.

  Dewey Number: A823.3

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  A Different Kind of Dreaming

  by Kate Constable

  I Own the Racecourse!

  I Own the Racecourse! was first published in 1968, a time when dollars were ‘new-fangled’, and a gang of eleven- and twelve-year-old kids could roam the streets and laneways of inner Sydney all day without anyone worrying about them, as long as they were home in time for dinner.

  Andy Hoddel is a member of one of these gangs. But he is not like the other children.

  Back then, no one used the term ‘intellectual disability’: they used harsher, crueller words. Patricia Wrightson never puts a label on Andy. Instead, she describes the way he seems to live ‘behind a closed window’, as if a sheet of glass separates him from other people. Sometimes he laughs too long and too loudly, or flies into a wild rage when others might shrug and walk away. He doesn’t always understand when someone’s making a joke; he trusts what people tell him. He is friendly and eager and gentle, and lots of people like him. But he is different, and everyone knows it, even Andy himself.

  The year after this book was first published, my sister was born. Just like Andy’s friends and family, we slowly realised that she was different from other children. As a child, my sister was small and quiet, shy and sweet, with a worried, uncertain smile. The same invisible pane of glass separated her from other people that comes between Andy and his neighbours in Appington Hill.

  Like Andy, my sister was friendly and trusting, but she struggled at school and she was unhappy there. When she was twelve, she was a pretty lonely kid. We did our best, yet we were always torn between the fierce desire to protect and shield her, and the need to prepare her to survive, to take care of herself. It’s a dilemma that Andy’s friends also have to face: how do you help a person like Andy understand that the world can sometimes be cruel without also hurting someone who is so vulnerable, so exposed?

  When the old man collecting empty bottles at Beecham Park racecourse teases Andy by offering to sell him the place, the boy takes him seriously, and hurries off to raise the cash—three whole dollars! By the time Andy has scrounged up the money and handed it over, the old man has forgotten their conversation, though he’s happy to pocket the cash. And now Andy has a secret so huge he can hardly grasp it.

  We read on with our hearts in our mouths, dreading the moment when Andy’s impossible dream will be shattered. Like his anxious friends, Joe and Mike and Matt and Terry, at first we are indignant on Andy’s behalf. Then, increasingly, we become fearful. Andy is so delighted, so proud to be the owner of this glorious place. Beecham Park might seem dusty and careworn by day, with its shabby stands and litter blowing about. But on race nights, it is transformed. Patricia Wrightson creates a magical place, rich with secret splendour, alive with glitter and lights and noise—the thundering horses, the buzz of the crowd, the tireless fun of the greyhounds. And all this belongs to Andy.

  Except, of course, that his shining dream can’t really be true. We know, like his friends, that it’s all going to come crashing down. Or so we think. But what follows is unexpected and far more magical.

  Appington Hill isn’t a real place, but there are suburbs very like it in the inner west of Sydney. In the time Patricia Wrightson was writing, it was a working-class area, run-down but tight-knit. People lived a shared life in the back lanes and at the front doors that opened directly from the living room onto the street. They looked out for each other, were generous if money was scarce and watched over each other’s children. The Appington Hill boys roam the neighbourhood, wander down to the timber yards by the docks, clamb
er down cliffs, ride homemade skateboards along the hilly streets, fish debris out of the canal. That kind of shared street life doesn’t happen much now. We live in more anxious times.

  But Andy’s mother doesn’t worry about him, so long as he’s with his friends. Mrs Hoddel is alone—we don’t find out what’s happened to Andy’s father—trying to earn enough to keep the two of them, and looking after Andy ‘so people don’t talk’. Neighbourhoods like these are full of kindness, but they can be full of hurtful gossip, too. The boys are just as anxious to protect Andy’s mother as they are to protect Andy himself.

  A bittersweet and loving book—it’s no wonder I Own the Racecourse! was so popular in Australia. It was subsequently made into a movie, and published in the United States and Britain as A Racecourse for Andy.

  Patricia Wrightson is one of Australia’s best known and loved writers. She is famous not only for realist fiction, but also for the magic realism in later books such as The Nargun and the Stars, in which she attempted to reconcile the mythologies of the first Australians with the modern world. Wrightson is brilliant at showing us the hidden magic in everyday places, whether it’s the lush landscape of the north coast of New South Wales, where she spent most of her life, or the crowded streets of Sydney, where she also lived for a time.

  Wrightson was later criticised for using Indigenous material, but her intention was always to help all Australians to appreciate the particular and ancient magic within the land—a project which some would argue is today more important than ever. In any case, her beautiful and sensitive writing deserves to be celebrated.

  When Wrightson died, in 2010, she was one of the most honoured children’s authors in Australia. She was awarded an OBE in 1977 and the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 1986, and was four times the winner of the Children’s Book Council Book of the Year.

  Her friend and editor Mark Macleod commented after her death: ‘I thought she would live forever—with that sharp, searching intelligence, that gravelly voiced, old-fashioned correctness of delivery, that passion for justice, that kindness and modesty. Few Australian writers for young people have equalled and none have surpassed her achievements.’

  The question at the heart of I Own the Racecourse! might be: what’s real and what’s not? When Andy’s glorious dream at last fades away, the love and friendship that have wrapped around him are still there, just as Beecham Park remains solid and quiet when the glamour and splendour of race night is over. Ultimately, it’s Andy’s version of what’s real that triumphs: because he believed it so hard, he really did own the racecourse. ‘He’s got to have things sometimes,’ his wise friend Mike says, ‘even if he does bust them.’

  As for my sister, she’s grown up now and doing pretty well. She has a job, with supportive workmates, and a home of her own. But I wish that when she was twelve years old, she’d had friends like Andy’s in Patricia Wrightson’s thoughtful, tender novel.

  1

  Saturday Afternoon

  Andy Hoddel stood on the pavement in Blunt Street and watched his friends taking turns on a skateboard. The street went plunging downhill into a deep hollow and rose steeply again beyond it. On this side of the street, the pavement ran down under high blank walls; on the opposite side, a row of quaint old cottages tipped downhill with the street. The cottages were clumsy and ugly, squashed together in terraces, and each with a tiny square of front garden. To make up for their sameness and their squat, narrow ugliness they were all painted different colours: sooty blue, grimy green, pink fading to yellow, white turning grey. They all wore television antennae like crazy parasols on their roofs.

  It was Saturday afternoon, and the criss-crossed, up-and-down streets of Appington Hill were very quiet. Still, the boys had to time their runs carefully, watching for the cars that came tipping suddenly out of side-streets. Each in turn, the boys went swooping downhill like birds, the wheels of the skateboard singing on the asphalt. Near the bottom of the hill, Wattle Road cut across Blunt Street in a longer, easier slope to the left. Sometimes the skateboard would swing away down this slope; sometimes it would plunge straight on into the hollow, past the entrance to Beecham Park Trotting Course, and mount a little way up the opposite rise. No one knew which it would do. Even the rider hardly knew until he had started his run, with the wind in his ears and the board vibrating under his feet, whether he would lean a little to the right and resist the curve or lean a little to the left and slip into it. Those at the top of the hill would watch expectantly until the moment passed; and every time, whether the board turned and disappeared or went straight on, Andy Hoddel would laugh excitedly. That was his share of the game.

  Mike and Terry O’Day owned the skateboard, having made it from a bit of board and an old roller-skate. They stood together on the pavement and watched its performance critically—two stern, long-nosed faces, two pairs of narrowed brown eyes, two heads of red-brown hair. Terry’s head was a little lower than Mike’s, for Terry was eleven and Mike twelve.

  ‘A bit too long in the back,’ said Terry. ‘I told you before.’

  ‘You’re off your rocker,’ declared Mike.

  ‘Half an inch too much behind the back wheels. She’ll tip up backwards one of these days.’

  ‘That’ll be the day.’

  There was no heat in this argument but Joe Mooney knew it could go on, flat and unyielding, for hours. There hadn’t seemed to be anything wrong with the skateboard when he was riding it, but he watched it anxiously on its way down the hill. ‘Maybe she’s a shade long in the back.’

  ‘She’ll do,’ said Terry, changing sides at once to agree with Mike. The O’Day boys never allowed anyone else into their private arguments.

  Andy, leaning against a brick wall that was scaly with dirt and age, had listened to the argument as he listened to all his friends’ discussions. A frangipani tree leaning over the wall threw a patch of shade on the pavement, and a stray dog had crept into the shade at Andy’s feet. He stirred its ginger hair with his toe, and the dog thumped the pavement with its stumpy tail.

  Matt Pasan had finished his ride and was climbing the hill with the board tucked under his arm. The others watched him come slowly up, past the high blank walls and closed ticket windows of the trotting course, pausing to allow a car to pass before he crossed Wattle Road, then coming on up the steepest part of the rise. He was out of breath and his hair clung to his damp forehead in the heat of early summer, but he shouted cheerfully in spite of it.

  ‘Right to Ma Willock’s gate—like to see you beat that.’

  ‘Like to see ’em beat that!’ shouted Andy suddenly. ‘Eh, Matt?’

  The others looked at him with the patience of long habit, neither forced nor polite. They were used to Andy and accepted him.

  ‘Your turn this time, Andy,’ called Matt, teasing. ‘Come on, have a go!’

  Andy laughed uneasily, waiting to see what they expected of him.

  ‘Turn it up, Pasan!’ called Joe quickly. ‘He’s having you on, Andy. There’s too many cars.’

  Andy laughed again, this time with relief. ‘You can’t fool me, Matt Pasan!’ he called. ‘I wouldn’t ride that thing. It’s too long in the back.’ He smiled warmly at all his friends and leaned back against the wall, out of their way.

  Matt came up, his dark, lively face bent over the skateboard while he felt its wheels, testing their firmness. Joe watched seriously. His thin, long-jawed face was often serious. Joe was as tall as Mike O’Day, and the same age. Matt, like Terry, was a year younger. With their eyes fixed on the skateboard, none of them noticed a grey police van coast silently to the kerb behind them. They jumped a little, and stared at their feet, when the constable’s stern voice reached them.

  ‘All right, you boys,’ said Constable Grace from the window of the van. ‘Get that board off the streets. We’ve got enough accidents to worry about without you asking for more. Get going, now; and if I catch you again I’ll be having a word with your dads.’

  Reluctantl
y, the boys stirred. Terry muttered, ‘My go next time,’ and tucked the board under his arm. They trailed off slowly across the street towards the ugly little cottages. Only Andy stayed where he was and looked bewildered.

  ‘What’s up?’ he called after them. ‘We aren’t hurting, are we? What’s up with him?’ he frowned at Constable Grace and called again. ‘Joe! Where you going? You wasn’t doing no harm!’

  Joe paused in the middle of the street and waited. ‘Come on, Andy. We got to go.’

  A black storm came over Andy’s face. He shouted at the constable. ‘They wasn’t doing no harm!’ His mouth seemed too small and slow to make the words come fast enough. ‘Matt—Terry—Joe—wasn’t doing no harm! You’re a big urger. That’s what you are.’

  Joe and Mike had gone back and taken Andy’s arms. ‘Put a sock in it, boy,’ they muttered urgently. ‘It’s all right, we don’t mind. Come on. It’s all right, I tell you.

  ‘Urger!’ shouted Andy, craning back at the constable as he was led away. ‘Great big urger! Urger!’ The constable waited passively. He had opened the door of the van and was ready to hold up any traffic that might suddenly appear in the narrow street.

  ‘Will you come on?’ said Mike, exasperated. ‘You’ll end up getting the lot of us in bad with the cops.’

  ‘He’s a great big urger, that’s what he is,’ Andy explained indignantly. ‘You wasn’t doing no harm.’

  ‘It’s for our own good,’ Joe soothed him. ‘He doesn’t want us getting knocked off by cars, that’s all. We’re going to have a look at the joss house now.’

  Andy frowned, muttered, and was silent. They hurried him round the nearest corner and out of the constable’s sight. There Joe and Mike dropped Andy’s arms and looked at each other, breathing deeply. Terry was frowning; he hated to be made to look foolish. Matt said ‘Whew!’ and suddenly exploded into chuckles.

  ‘The big urger!’ he gasped.

  In a minute they were all giggling and looking at Andy with a sort of admiration. Andy’s black scowl faded. He grinned too, and began to swagger a little. When the others went on he dropped contentedly behind them and followed. His eyes, which were round and very blue, were as placid as usual. His face, which was round too, was as warm and friendly as usual. At the back of his head, where the crown was, his fair hair stuck up in little spikes that would never lie flat.