Something for the Pain Read Free Page B

it has been sometimes for me: a sort of higher vocation excusing us from engaging with the mundane.

3. A Bernborough Finish
    I WAS NEVER one for hanging pictures or sticking up posters or postcards. I’ve always preferred to be surrounded by bare, plain surfaces and to have my desk facing a wall rather than a window. Early in 1982, however, when I was a lecturer in a college of advanced education and had been moved to a new office, I discovered that a part of the wall above my desk was a display board with a supply of drawing pins stuck into it, and after staring at it for a few weeks I went against my usual policy. I was careful and selective. The display board was big enough for thirty or forty postcard-sized pictures, but I pinned up only three and grouped them together with much bare space around them. The first two were portraits: one of Emily Brontë and the other of Marcel Proust. The third was actually two linked scenes, the first showing a field of horses entering the straight, and the second showing the winner of the race and his nearest rivals as they reached the winning post. The race was the T. M. Ahern Memorial Handicap, run at Doomben in Brisbane on 1 June 1946. The total prize money for the race was ten thousand pounds, only two hundred pounds less than for the Melbourne Cup of the same year. The race was run over a distance of about 1320 metres, in today’s measurements, and was contested by twenty-seven of the best sprinters in Australia.
    Races in Brisbane are run in a clockwise direction, and so my picture of the horses on the home turn was at the right of the picture of the finish. The pictures were blurred reproductions of contemporary newspaper illustrations, but it was enough for me that the names of the chief contenders were printed legibly above them. I knew when I first pinned up the pictures that the straight at Doomben was comparatively short for a metropolitan racecourse. I have since learned that it was about 370 metres in 1946. The picture at the right showed Bernborough in about twentieth place and about thirty-five metres from the leaders. In the picture at the left, Bernborough was passing the post in first place, several metres ahead of the second horse.
    The twenty horses that Bernborough passed were not tiring stayers at the end of a gruelling long-distance race but crack sprinters at full gallop. Bernborough did not always win his races in this way, but he did it often enough to give rise to an expression often used by journalists and others for many years afterwards. A racehorse or a sportsperson or even a team achieving victory from a seemingly hopeless position was said to have put up a Bernborough finish.
    I worked out of the same office from 1981 until I took early retirement in 1995, by which time my place of employment had become a university. During those years, I sometimes sensed that some or another visitor to my room was puzzled by the odd little group of images huddled together on the otherwise bare wall. To the few who enquired I was pleased to explain that the young woman from Victorian England, the eccentric Frenchman, and the bay stallion from Queensland were equally prominent figures in my private mythology and continued to enrich my life equally.
    In a better sort of world, I would not have to write this paragraph, but Bernborough (Orange, purple sleeves, black cap) has been somewhat forgotten by now, even by followers of racing. He was born a few months after my own birth and died a few weeks before my twenty-first birthday. His birthplace was near Oakey, on the Darling Downs, and he died at Spendthrift Farm in Kentucky. He was a huge animal but was said by his handlers to be unusually placid for a stallion and highly intelligent. The most extraordinary part of his story was that few Australians had heard of him until he was six years old. Until then he raced only at Clifford Park racecourse in Toowoomba, where he won about half of his races. Bernborough’s defeats