Something for the Pain Read Free

first girlfriend, and the instructors employed by two separate schools of ballroom dancing all tried to teach me, but to no avail. I am not by nature a clumsy person, yet somehow the effort to place my feet in the correct positions while holding a female person at close quarters and conducting with her an intermittent conversation—somehow, all this was too much for me. I went to a few dances as a young man and even dared sometimes to dance with some or another young female person. What am I saying? I never danced with anyone. I stumbled and tottered and tried to bluff my way around the dance floor, all the while praying for the music to stop, and I remain to this day grateful to the few young women, whoever they were, who glided backwards in front of me, keeping out of reach of my clodhopping feet.
    I dared thus sometimes but mostly I preferred to lurk near the rear of the dance hall with the other young males who were reluctant or unable to dance. I knew that we were the male equivalents of wallflowers: those young women who sat through a dance because no one had claimed them as partners. Perhaps I even understood that we were cowards by comparison—the young women sat bravely alone while we males tried to hide ourselves in a pack. I wonder whether I sometimes tried to appear to be in earnest conversation with one of my companions, as though we had serious matters to settle before returning to the frivolity of the dance floor.
    Nearly twenty years before my birth, my father hung about the rear of dance halls and, on one occasion at least, he had an earnest conversation with another of his kind. The previous sentence is perhaps misleading. My father’s interlocutor was like him in being a reluctant dancer but quite unlike him in being drunk. (My father was a lifelong abstainer.) Perhaps the other man had been drunk when he arrived at the dance, or perhaps some of the young men present had been drinking beer or spirits in the darkness outside the hall, as would have happened often in the country district where my father grew up. Regardless of what or where the man had been drinking, he must have been drunk indeed to have discussed what he discussed with my father at the rear of the dance hall.
    I am writing not history but a batch of recollected impressions and daydreams. With only a single statistic to support me, I mention here one of the most noticeable changes in racing during my lifetime. From about the 1960s, when off-course totalisator betting was legalised and became widespread, the number of on-course bookmakers has dwindled and such expressions as ‘beating the bookmaker’ have become outmoded. Things were different indeed during my youth and, from what I’ve read and heard, things were mightily different before my time. I looked just now into the race book that I bought for two shillings on the cold day in June 1964 when I went to the races at Caulfield with the young woman who later became my wife. On the pages listing the bookmakers betting that day, 266 names appear. At the equivalent meeting this year, perhaps a tenth of that number might be counted.
    The scale of betting seems also to have declined. Legalised off-course betting greatly increased the revenue of the racing clubs and more than compensated for the loss of gate takings from the smaller crowds. Much of the increased revenue went into the prize money paid to owners of winners and placed horses. For many years now, successful owners have been able to recoup a large part of their expenses from prize money alone. In the 1960s and earlier, the only way for an owner to show a profit was by betting. I knew a small-time owner in the 1950s who bet two hundred pounds on his horse whenever it started in a race. This was a very modest bet for an owner of those days, and yet its equivalent in today’s money would be more than ten thousand dollars. When one of the leading stables was confident of the chances of one of their horses, owner, trainer and stable