could not persuade him that Alf’s horse was in the Cup with a genuine chance, as a racing journalist might have put it. Mr Dillon, as I called him (he was white-haired and sixtyish; I was eighteen) tried to explain to me that most owners of racehorses would be proud to have a horse good enough merely to compete in the Melbourne Cup and that the owners of Alf’s horse were surely no exception. The horse was named Carbea (its colours will be mentioned below); it had been running unplaced in recent country events; and its odds were a hundred-to-one. I did not claim that Carbea could win but I had convinced myself that it must have been much better than its form suggested if Alf Sands had approved of its being entered in the Cup. I bet Mr Dillon a pound (one-eighth of my weekly wage) that Carbea would finish in the first third of the field. In racing parlance, Carbea never flattered at any stage. He finished seventeenth of nineteen, and Mr Dillon said he had never earned a pound more easily.
Something else that Marcel Proust, forty and more years before my birth, discovered about lover-worshippers: they change their own likes and preferences to match those of their idols. I had been evaluating racing colours for some years before I became a devotee of Alf Sands. At no time had the colours gold and red appealed to me until I learned that the colours of the Sands stable were Gold, red stars and cuffs. It required some effort of the imagination (I would have preferred my hero’s coat of arms to have been more muted and subtle), but I came to approve of the rich gold and the fiery red as denoters of accumulating wealth and a defiance of convention. I even found an admirable contrariness in the fact that the background was gold and not the stars themselves, as might have been expected.
Another fact about Alf that I accommodated after some early difficulty was his connection with the city of Grafton, in northern New South Wales. As a boy, I had settled on what would be my ideal landscapes for the rest of my life: the green and mostly level countryside of south-western Victoria. Even then, I had developed what would become a lifelong dislike of travel. If, for some reason, I had been obliged to leave the state of Victoria, I might have endured a move to Tasmania or New Zealand but to nowhere else. Queensland, and even New South Wales, seemed subtropical and alien places, but I learned by some or another means that Alf Sands and his family often spent the winter in Grafton, taking a few horses with them and racing them locally. Perhaps I was helped to accept this by my learning that jacaranda trees abound in Grafton. At that time, I supposed that my own racing colours ought to be partly lilac or lavender or mauve. Perhaps the jacarandas of Grafton were not even in bloom during Alf’s sojourn there, but I saw him often as walking his horses of a morning or afternoon through an intermittent shower of blossoms of one of my favourite colours, and I forgave him any bafflement he might have caused me by his travelling northwards.
From the 1960s onwards, the career of the actual A. R. Sands might be said to have levelled out or even declined. Heavily backed horses might be comfortably beaten into second or third place when, in earlier years, they would either win or be narrowly beaten. My father, who was no longer alive to witness the gradual decline of the man he had once called the smartest trainer in Melbourne—my father might have said that the elderly Alf had lost his touch, but I supposed that my hero was no longer driven as in earlier years. Like Jack Holt, he would have invested much of his winnings in real estate and shares; he no longer depended on racing for his livelihood.
When last I saw his name in print, A. R. Sands was training an occasional winner in Brisbane, which is a place I have never felt the least inclination to visit. I assume that he died there long ago, but the ‘he’ of this sentence is the actual A. R.
Something else that Marcel Proust, forty and more years before my birth, discovered about lover-worshippers: they change their own likes and preferences to match those of their idols. I had been evaluating racing colours for some years before I became a devotee of Alf Sands. At no time had the colours gold and red appealed to me until I learned that the colours of the Sands stable were Gold, red stars and cuffs. It required some effort of the imagination (I would have preferred my hero’s coat of arms to have been more muted and subtle), but I came to approve of the rich gold and the fiery red as denoters of accumulating wealth and a defiance of convention. I even found an admirable contrariness in the fact that the background was gold and not the stars themselves, as might have been expected.
Another fact about Alf that I accommodated after some early difficulty was his connection with the city of Grafton, in northern New South Wales. As a boy, I had settled on what would be my ideal landscapes for the rest of my life: the green and mostly level countryside of south-western Victoria. Even then, I had developed what would become a lifelong dislike of travel. If, for some reason, I had been obliged to leave the state of Victoria, I might have endured a move to Tasmania or New Zealand but to nowhere else. Queensland, and even New South Wales, seemed subtropical and alien places, but I learned by some or another means that Alf Sands and his family often spent the winter in Grafton, taking a few horses with them and racing them locally. Perhaps I was helped to accept this by my learning that jacaranda trees abound in Grafton. At that time, I supposed that my own racing colours ought to be partly lilac or lavender or mauve. Perhaps the jacarandas of Grafton were not even in bloom during Alf’s sojourn there, but I saw him often as walking his horses of a morning or afternoon through an intermittent shower of blossoms of one of my favourite colours, and I forgave him any bafflement he might have caused me by his travelling northwards.
From the 1960s onwards, the career of the actual A. R. Sands might be said to have levelled out or even declined. Heavily backed horses might be comfortably beaten into second or third place when, in earlier years, they would either win or be narrowly beaten. My father, who was no longer alive to witness the gradual decline of the man he had once called the smartest trainer in Melbourne—my father might have said that the elderly Alf had lost his touch, but I supposed that my hero was no longer driven as in earlier years. Like Jack Holt, he would have invested much of his winnings in real estate and shares; he no longer depended on racing for his livelihood.
When last I saw his name in print, A. R. Sands was training an occasional winner in Brisbane, which is a place I have never felt the least inclination to visit. I assume that he died there long ago, but the ‘he’ of this sentence is the actual A. R.
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