Something for the Pain by Gerald Murnane

Author:Gerald Murnane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2015-09-23T04:00:00+00:00

14. Basil Burgess at Moonee Valley

ONE OF THE many colloquial expressions that I enjoy hearing or using is the description of some or another man as having short arms and deep pockets, meaning that he pays for his shout or buys a raffle ticket reluctantly, if at all. I’ve always considered myself a prompt payer and generous with money, and perhaps I am, but I learned at several racecourses during the last months of 1974 that I’m a punter with short arms and deep pockets.

In the early months of 1974, my salary was higher than ever before and higher than it would be until nearly twenty years later, when the college of advanced education where I then worked became part of a university and I became a senior lecturer. In early 1974, I was the assistant editor in the Publications Branch of the Education Department of Victoria. I was second in charge of a staff of about twenty and could expect to become editor in five or ten years, depending on when my boss chose to retire. The work was pleasant enough, but my heart was not in it. Telling twenty people what to do and trying to keep up with my boss, who was driven by a manic energy, left me in no mood to write fiction during my evenings and weekends. I had been writing fiction in my free time for nearly ten years. My first book was on its way to being published, and I had begun a second, but I could not foresee myself keeping up my double life for much longer.

An unlikely solution suggested itself. House husbands, as they later came to be called, were unheard of at that time, but my wife and I decided that I should become one. We were not trying to bring in a new social order; we simply did what suited us both, even though our household income was somewhat reduced. My wife had been confined to the house with our three small sons for four years and wanted to resume her career. I was used to helping with housework and shopping and child minding, and I looked forward to spending the day in a quiet house instead of a stressful office. The new set-up worked well for a few years, until our sons’ upbringing began to cost more than my wife’s income alone could provide, but that’s another story.

I knew better than to expect much money from the sales of my books of literary fiction, but I hoped to earn a modest income from betting—yes, betting on racehorses. Despite my father’s dismal record and my own lack of success in earlier years, I still believed I could beat the odds. I had a new approach to punting. Since I had started to bet, in the year after I left school, I had gone to each race meeting with a small sum, hoping to turn it into a large sum. My new approach, in the 1970s, seemed much more businesslike.

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