*

.

Welcome back Spoon.  We've  missed ya.

THERE....IS....NO....SPOOOOON , ................ Untill Now, welcome back,

d

an honour and a privilege to have Mr TINS back in our midst, or as they say in korea, anyong haseyo

TINS says you are most kind; anyong haseyo mr judge. My Australian name is Therisa



Therisa Moooon

Jim Roberts dearly loved his father, for that I can vouch. He always spoke of him to me as a kindly man; yet when we discussed this book, a note of bitterness came into his voice as he spoke of his father’s influence on him as a child.

                                                   *

Towards the end, Jim fretted over the book – could I get pen and paper to write it during my two-year jail term?
I had some freedom of movement; he had none; so it fell to me to investigate possibilities of obtaining pen and paper. Paper and pencils, if not pen and ink, could be organized; the grape-vine informed me.

When I told Jim, he said; “But the screws might be on your back.”

So I went further into the matter with a prisoner known as “The Bush Lawyer” because of his shrewdness in illicit jail traffic and his willingness to give advice.

“It is the right of every criminal to rehabilitate himself,” he said, working his head leftwards and screwing his mouth in the opposite direction – “if he wants to”, he added with that curious irony characteristic of Australians, so marked here in the jail – “You get paraded to the Governor and ask for a course – a course in anything, say shorthand writing, anything that will need pen and paper. Then they must give you a pen and paper in your cell every day between four ‘o’clock and lights out…”



                                                         2

Winter  1928. A Friday evening. Cissie Roberts was washing up in the little corrugated-iron kitchen off the verandah at the rear of the house. Tom Roberts sitting by the open log-fire-place in the living-room, or dining-room as they called it. His stockinged feet resting on the mantle-piece, he was reading the racing pages of the evening paper. Young Jim sat at the large table, drawing in an exercise book. A lanky but healthy-looking 10 year old, his tongue followed his pencil as he copied out of a newspaper, his black curls bobbing.

After much rubbing out and alteration, he arose and took the book to his father’s side. “Look, Dad,” he said, his wide blue eyes expressing his wish for praise.

His father looked at the drawing without interest. “Hmm. That’s real good, son, the dead spittin image.”
“Course I copied it out of the paper.”

“All good artists start by copying, son.”

The father settled himself more comfortably in the old cane chair and returned to his paper.

Jim fussed around him, seeking affection.

“Are they going to play cards on Sunday, Dad?”

“Er, yes, son,” the father replied.

“Gee, that’s good. I might find some pennies or threepences on the floor next morning.”

His father was not listening, so he repeated his words and at last got a reluctant reply.

“Um, yes, I always tell them to leave anything they drop for the sweeper.”

Jim placed his hands round his father’s thighs. “Will we listen to the wrestle?”

“Sure thing,” the father said, without having considered the matter. Gently but firmly he pushed his son’s hands away.

Rebuffed and a little hurt, Jim returned to his seat at the table and chewed his pencil. The father selected from a pile of racing papers and supplements on the floor beside his chair a copy of The Circle , a squat, thick journal of racing form, track gallops and news. He began to study “the stars of the night”, the probable odds of the horses for the next day’s meeting. This title was used to evade a law banning publication of prices off the racecourse before a race. Presently, Cissie Roberts entered. The approach of middle age showed in her wide hips, flabby arms, wrinkled elbows and greying hair. The struggle to keep her household and bring up her children on what was left of Tom’s small wages after his gambling debts had been paid left her face prematurely lined and careworn. Yet the brightness of her personality had not been subdued nor her energetic character impaired.

i was starting to think your name was, therewasa spoon

after his gambling debts had been paid left her face prematurely lined and careworn. Yet the brightness of her personality had not been subdued nor her energetic character impaired.

She sat on the chair on the other side of the fireplace, picked up the poker and prodded the fading embers.
“And is it keeping the fire warm you two are?” she asked, in a musical voice with just a touch of Irish brogue.
She placed two pieces of wood on the fire and stoked it to life.

She turned to her husband. “You needn’t bother burying your nose in the racing papers, Tom. You won’t be betting tomorrow. The rent’s behind and there’s a few bills to pay.”

“Yes, I know, Cissie,” he replied sheepishly putting the paper aside. “I might just have a shilling on a roughie.  I’m just trying to pick a long-pop. Just invest a bob or two, maybe, and win enough to pull up the rent.”

“If you hadn’t been investing a bob or two the rent wouldn’t be behind,” she replied. Then noticing that Jim was listening, she rebuked him: “All right, young man, it’s time you were in bed.”

“Aw, gee, Mum, I want to listen to the wrestle. Dad said…”

“Never mind what your father said, I’m saying you must go to bed. You’ve been staying up late too often and you aren’t so smart in the morning.”

Cissie, in spite of her love for the children, was, when tired, brusque with them. Tears came to Jim’s eyes; he was easily hurt.  Sulkily he went to the adjoining bedroom, in which Margaret slept in one single bed, and he shared the other with Gerald. He left the door and began to undress in the beam of light.

In the living-room the discussion between his parents was degenerating into a bitter quarrel.

“ I can’t stand it anymore, Tom,” he heard his mother saying. “You’ve got to stop. For weeks you’ve been losing nearly half your wages. I keep house on little more than what you lose.  And you so deceitful about it. Lying, deceiving. Oh, I can’t stand it, Tom – Jim ,shut that door!”

The sudden accusation of eavesdropping shocked young Jim. “I’m getting undressed,” he said, beginning to sob.
“Well, you can get undressed in the dark,” his mother answered, distraught now and unmindful that she was hurting him. She slammed the door shut.

The quarrel continued. Weeping as he undressed, Jim still caught snatches of it.
“The children need clothes, shoes……..The grocer won’t give us any more credit…..It’s hard enough to make ends meet…..”
And his father mumbling, ashamedly, but stubborn……

Suddenly, as Jim told me years later, he needed them to stop quarrelling and come to him. He raised his sobs to near-wailing. Working himself up to attract attention. Soon the door opened and his mother entered angrily.
“And what’s the matter with you?”

“I don’t like to hear you and Daddy quarrelling.”

“Your father and I aren’t quarrelling. You are just sulking because you can’t listen to the wrestling.”
“No I’m not Mummy,” he sobbed.

Softening, she placed an arm round him and kissed his forehead. “You’re just overtired lad. Hop into bed now.” He did as he was bid and she left, closing the door behind her. Jim wept quietly into the pillow after gently moving his little brother from the centre of the bed. He could still hear the sound of low-toned argument from the living-room.
After a while, his mother came to the door and opened it a little.
“Are you asleep, Jim?”
“No, Mummy.”
“Well, good night.”
“Good night, Mummy. Good night Daddy!”
“Good night, son”

He heard his parents retire to the bedroom adjoining his at the front of the house. He heard their voices, muffled by the thin walls, but still quarrelling – and he had cried himself to sleep before they had ceased.

                                                   
                                                        *


Already I have the faculty of guessing the time to within a few minutes. Soon the jail will be plunged into darkness.
The cold May night, presaging the onset of a bitter Melbourne winter, had driven me to bed before lights out, but I could not sleep. We have only old army-style blankets. “You could read the paper through them,” one criminal told me the other day. Shivering a little, I had risen and placed the floor, seven steps to and seven steps fro, rubbing my arms.

Somewhere down the grim corridor, a prisoner sings softly…..” They say we are too young, too really be in love” – and I hear a warder pass on his way to silence him. There are words, rumbling like falling rock in a deep mine shaft. The prisoners rag the warder with forced banter and obscenity. He rushes about the corridor shouting for silence. Another warder comes down, threatening solitary confinement.

Soon a snore here and there and **** mumblings tell that the jail is sinking into uneasy sleep.
But I am wakeful, trying to forget the cold and think of the book. Words and images don’t come easily. I write slowly and clumsily.


Different to writing bank letters………………..

The gamblers duly arrived.

Jim claimed that. like all poker players, they revealed their personalities through their methods of play. There was Peter Lynch, a partially crippled war veteran, a man of morose, petulant temperament, who was known to his fellow gamblers as “Old Weep and Win”. Peter would complain of his ill luck until he was almost weeping, then his luck would change and he would nearly always win in the end.


And there was Jack Pittson, the starting-price bookmaker with whom Tom Roberts bet each race day. Pittson was manager of a grocer’s shop in High Street; his wife worked at the frock shop across the street.  Not content with having two pay envelopes, he ran the book at the local pub on the side. He didn’t like running a book, his wife liked the idea even less, but they tolerated the stigma because their god was money and the security it would bring. A coward, Pittson lived in constant fear of detection by the police or his employers, but greed drove him to continue the SP business even after his doctor diagnosed a heart complaint. Jack Pittson has a lisp which earned him the nickname “Fousand” after he informed some customers, in a rare moment of confidence,  that he intended getting out of the SP game after he had made a “fousand” pounds. Nervous and mean-natured, he played cards to make money. He was not a gambler; taking risks, especially with money, was foreign to his nature – so he gambled with nervous circumspection and usually won at cards.

Then there was Curly Condon, a young man who worked in the store of the factory at which Tom Roberts was employed. Good natured and reckless, curly could, with a run of good hands, clean a poker school out, but usually he lost because his optimistic temperament led him to over-value his cards.

In Tom Roberts’s poker school, too, was Ted Gaynor, the accountant at the grocer’s shop where Jack Pittson worked. He had newly taken to gambling, first on horses because of the proximity of Pittson, and later on cards. Like a convert to a religion, he was a fervent worshipper. His knowledge of mathematics could have made him a good poker player, but his new-found love of speculation combined with it to cause him to play one minute with canny skill, the next with rash clumsiness.

The fifth player was Jack O’Donnell, a workmate of Tom Roberts and his closest friend. O’Donnell was a trade union shop steward and a keen Labourite. He liked his occasional flutter at cards and a bob each way on a horse; yet he was a man of even temperament upon whom gambling could never get its tightest grip. He played steadily, without great skill, but soberly, rarely winning or losing much, enjoying the game for its own sake.

The last player was, of course, Tom Roberts himself. There was no doubt that Tom Roberts knew all the finer points of playing poker, yet, over a period, he lost more money than he won because he gambled for the sheer love of gambling. He knew the value of his cards; his expression was the same whether he drew a good hand or a bad one, whether betting with winning hand or bluffing; he was capable of analysing his opponents’ methods of valuing their cards and of misleading them as to his own methods. As a result, he often played with great skill, but just as often he lapsed into rashness to satisfy his need to gamble.

Tom Roberts was a striking man on those rare occasions when he dressed up. That night, he wore his dark-blue suit, an old fashioned celluloid collar and a black tie. His hair, greying prematurely but with dignity, was brushed straight back from his fine forehead. He sat at the head of the table. Behind him, a wedding photo of himself and Cissie demonstrated that her assertion , “everyone said we were the handsomest couple,” was not just womanly pride.
Now Cissie prayed in her bedroom that Tom would somehow break the gambling habit.

Tom sat at the table flicking a new pack of cards between the forefinger and thumb of his right hand, his face set in the excited tenseness of the gambler.

The draw for dealer concluded, play began.

Anyone reading this in their "quieter times"? Encouragement required....stat!!!

quite frankly its a waste of megabytes imo

Goodonya Chante, was thinking of cryovacking? the tome and express-posting it to DJ!


They all bought cards. If his dad had three of a kind coming in, he would win the hand with any kind of luck. The bought cards were dealt and betting began. Jack Pittson and Jack O’Donnell dropped out but the other three bet with Tom Roberts. Stakes rose until only Curly Condon and Tom Roberts remained.

“I’ll raise you to a pound,” Tom Roberts said. And a certain huskiness in his voice revealed his desperation. Jim knew that if his father lost he could not pay; the few shillings from the jar would be insufficient.

“I’ll have a look,” Curly said.
“A full hand! Aces on the roof!” Jim heard his father say. Good on you, Dad! You did have three of a kind and bought a pair to go with them!

“You win, Tom, three kings….Thought you might be bluffing,” Curly explained. And then the scrape of coins and Tom Roberts saying shakily: “ I was due for a change of luck.”

“I can’t get a decent hand,” Peter Lynch wailed.

“Don’t complain to me,” Curly replied. “I’m worse off. Getting beat with good hands.” Curly roared out his raucous laugh.

“Not so loud, Curly,” Tom Roberts said. “You’ll wake up the wife and kids.”

What relief and elation Tom Roberts must have felt. And Jim shared it. Dad had come from being broke to winning two, maybe three pounds. At that moment young Jim Roberts knew, for the first time, all the exaltation of the gambler after a desperate throw succeeds.

He listened for half an hour more, until fatigue flung sand in his eyes, his head began to nod and he became aware of his frozen feet. He climbed quietly into bed, warmed his feet on his brother’s legs and soon slept.

The results for each race were posted in code on the score board.

So, to the excitement of the football, the struggle for supremacy in speed and strength, the spectacular leaping for the ball and the long driving kicks, the intensity of the crowd, partisan to a man, was added the thrill of the unseen horse races. Jim knew his father followed the fate of the horses with more interest and excitement than that of the footballers, and he drew closer to his father by doing the same.

Tom Roberts was offhand with his children, though never unkind to them. The only other point of intimacy between Jim and his father was an irregular visit to Mass at the nearby Catholic Church. Jim went to mass every Sunday; his mother saw to that. But Tom Roberts, who was formally converted to Catholicism when he married Cissie, held no enthusiasm for his new religion, and had to be tricked into his infrequent visits to the Church. Every now and then, Cissie would deliberately leave Jim home from first Mass, and then suggest to Tom that he take the boy to second Mass. Though Tom was aware of the subterfuge, he never protested, and off he and Jim would go without religious fervour. Occasionally, Tom Roberts went with enthusiasm to housey-housey tournaments conducted to raise funds for the Church, you could bet on housey, but you couldn’t bet on Mass.

The seed of gambling fell on fertile soil, for Jim had the same restless, imaginative and impulsive temperament as his father.

That day, after the poker school, as he and his father came round the back of the house, Jim broke away and ran on to the porch. The porch was closed in with ply-wood; on one side of it was the small kitchenette; on the other what sufficed for a bathroom. Jim picked up his little football from the old table on the porch and inspected it. He had been greasing it with fat borrowed from his mother. Apparently satisfied wit it’s condition, he placed it under his arm and ran into the yard, shouting as he went: “I’m going out to play footie.”

Tom Roberts had entered the bathroom. He took an old tin dish from the little table and filled it with water from the tap at the end of the bath. The bath had been painted green, but now the rusty tin was showing through the paint. He soaped his hands, cupped them full of water and washed his face. Taking a frayed towel from a nail on the wall he dried his face, craning forward to inspect himself in the cracked mirror of the washstand.

In the kitchenette across the porch, Cissie Roberts was preparing the evening meal. No words had passed between them about the card game or its result. Breakfast was always a hurried affair and, that morning, it had passed without conversation.

Cissie busied herself all the more with her cooking, and Tom began to sing quietly, without conviction:
She was lovely and fair as the rose of summer,
Di da da, di da da, di da da,
Oh no, t’was the truth in her eyes ever dawning
That made me love Mary, the Rose of Tralee.

Having thus fortified himself with song, Tom walked towards the kitchenette, rubbing his hands, and said: “Nothing like a good cold wash to freshen a man up.”

Cissie turned from him and fiddled with the pots sizzling on the wood-stove.

“Ah,” Tom persisted with forced pleasantness, “something smells good.”

Cissie did not respond.

He sat on the chair at the end of the table. The makeshift room was just large enough to hold a table, a chair and a small dresser. Tom looked over his shoulder at the jar on the dresser. Before going to bed, he had replaced exactly the amount of money he had taken from it, but he still felt guilty.

Silence increased the tension between them. Tom broke first. He took a five-pound note from the inside pocket of his tattered working coat. “Well, here’s a fiver for you, Cissie. I won it last night.”

He held the note towards her but she ignored it. He withdrew his hand and crumpled the note.
Eventually, Cissie said: “I don’t want the money, tom. I don’t want food out of the mouths of your friends’ children. I’ll wait until pay day and handle all your wages for a change.”
Acting on a natural generous impulse, Tom replied: “Take the fiver Cissie,. I’m finished with gambling – and this time I mean it.”

His undertaking lasted exactly five days, until the following Saturday. Arriving home from work at half- past twelve, he gobbled down his lunch and said to Cissie: “Well, I think I’ll just slip down the street. Won’t be long, and when I get back I’ll plant them vegetables.”

Cissie studied his face for a moment and there saw the readiness to deceive, and she pitied him. He could never stop; He would go on until he died, and she would have to live with him, with him and the gambling mania.

not perceive that he did not say he would not bet.

He went into the yard. It was a big yard as yards go in Richmond, perhaps twenty yards deep and fifteen wide – much larger than the yards bordering it, as though the Roberts’s home had been built first and the others stacked tightly around it, facing and backing onto the narrow streets and lanes. The fences were tumble-down, the palings loose or missing. Along one side fence was a laundry, or wash-house as they used to call it, a woodshed and an un-sewered laundry, all crammed together unpainted and in disrepair. On the other side of the yard, Tom Roberts cultivated a small vegetable garden. Tom was neither expert nor enthusiastic as a gardener, but at Cissie’s insistence he managed to produce an occasional crop of vegetables.

Today, he was less enthusiastic than ever. Taking the barrow from the woodshed, he wheeled it to where a rubbish heap stood in the space between the lavatory and the back fence. All rubbish was burned in a drum and the ashes deposited on this heap. The nearest thing to treatment Tom’s garden received was infrequent addition of this “compost”.

Tom began to shovel the burned rubbish into the wheel-barrow. He worked with an air of sulkiness, like a child kept in at playtime. Having filled the barrow, he placed the shovel on top of the load and wheeled it to the vegetable garden where he had, on the previous Sunday, weeded and dug over a patch of soil.

He began to knead the compost into the soil with the shovel. Presently, he straightened his back and, after casting a furtive glance towards the house, walked swiftly to the lavatory, entered and closed the door. He sat on the seat, without pulling down his trousers, one foot outstretched against the door. He took a racing form guide from his side pocket, a pencil and soiled envelope from his top pocket. After studying the paper, he began writing a list of bets on the back of the envelope.

All the week he had been troubled by his promise to Cissie. He knew she was right. He wanted to please her, and at heart he knew that gambling was wrecking their life together. On the Tuesday and Wednesday, his resistance to gambling was strong enough to set up a conflict within him. On Thursday morning, he went so far as to say to Curly Condon and a few other workmates at smoko: “I’m giving the horses away. It’s a mug’s game.”

Their reaction was to laugh at the very thought of Tom Roberts ceasing gambling. Such is the perversity of Australian humour that their reaction was intended to indicate their approval of his change of heart, but Tom treated it as opposition and this temporarily strengthened his determination. Had he not refrained from betting on Wednesday, even though he was holding money? But reading his newspaper in the train on the way to work on Friday morning, his eyes strayed by force of habit to the racing pages. The old excitement gripped him as he read the entries and recorded in his mind the horses he fancied in each race. Having no other interest in life, how could he do otherwise? Indeed, horses he had been backing in recent weeks seemed to him certain to win most of the races. This idea often strikes gamblers when they are trying to reform, making it more difficult.

Sitting there in the lavatory, Tom Roberts checked his bets carefully. The list was typical of his gambling method. Two shillings on this, five shillings on that, three shillings on the other, if any from the lot, ten shillings on such and such – and so on through the programme, at least two horses in each race. He took two pound notes from his trouser pocket and wrapped them in the envelope making a small parcel an inch and a half square. This two pounds he had kept for himself after giving Cissie the five pound note and every penny of his wages.

With the envelope and money concealed in the palm of his right hand he began shovelling again. He kept looking down the narrow path at the side of the house as if expecting someone. Presently, young Jim ran through the front gate. He was throwing the football in the air and catching it as he went, darting this way and that This remarkable performance he accompanied with a description of a football match in the manner of a radio-commentator. There was a big game on in Jim’s mind, and he was playing the part of the famous players each in turn and all together, with that mental and physical energy a healthy ten-year-old boy can neither suppress, nor control, nor find satisfactory outlet for.

He was brought back to reality when his father called to him. He went to his father, holding the ball under his right arm. His father pressed the little parcel into Jim’s hand.

“Here, Jim, take that up to the pub and give it to Jack Pittson.”

“Righto , Dad.”

“Go straight there and come straight back – and watch the traffic.”

“ Righto, Dad,” Jim repeated. He threw the ball on the ground and made to dart off, but his father placed a hand on his shoulder and, glancing towards the house, said softly:
“And don’t say anything to your mother about it.”

“Righto , Dad,” Jim repeated. “Righto” was a favourite word of his then, he told me, and I can vouch that it remained so until the end of his days.

And so Jim Roberts dashed out the gate and towards the hotel, clutching the betting list and money in his hand, skipping and bounding, his dark woollen socks around the ankles of his well-worn boots.

[;)]

gamble with his own money.

During this period, Tom Roberts managed to keep ahead of the game for the first time in his life. He won very little, but had enough money to bet each week and had doubled his two pounds at the end of six weeks. Cissie herself, trusting by nature and convinced that her prayers had been answered, remained unsuspicious. Tom himself developed a guilty conscience, especially when he had to pretend to be penniless when, in fact, he was relatively well off.

Then one Saturday  Cissie suggested that Tom should take young Jim to the football.

“Since you haven’t been betting, I’ve paid off most of the bills. A day out would do you good  – and you know how Jim loves the football.”

Tom Roberts winced with shame and stammered: “Y – yes well, I don’t care myself, C-Cissie, but if young Jim would like it, well…..”


                                          *


I hear the warder’s steps and the click of the light switches. Four footsteps and the click of a switch…….Four footsteps and the click of a switch………….And again…….and again……

My own cell darkens. The jail and the book – and a bird call in the darkness.

It is the prisoner known as “The Galah” doing his interminable bird imitations. He is getting sotto-voce encouragement from a former city councillor, here for embezzlement, whose main diversion is to be accessory before the fact to The Galah in his dubious mimicry.

The performance is greeted with groans from the long suffering prisoners. From each side of the ground-floor corridor where my cell is situated and from the rows of cells above, shouts of disapproval are heard.

The Galah, apparently aware of the ineptitude of his mimicry, prefaces each imitation with the name of the bird to be assassinated – the whip bird, the canary, the kookaburra.

“Shut up, you cranky bastard.”

“Stop eggin’ him on, Con.”

“Come and stop him Tomato Face,” someone calls to the warder. “Stop the bludger before he drives us all mad!”

The hullaballoo brings a warder, angry and aggressive. The shouted abuse fading into jail silence.  The savagery of the damp cold. The darkness and the body of Jim Roberts buried in a nameless grave……


                                                  6

Tom Roberts and his son dressed up and left the house. Tom wore a grey hat, and a well-worn overcoat over his blue suit. Jim had polished his boots and cleaned his knees, after a fashion. He wore long knitted socks, overcoat and cap. He had grown out of the coat – it reached just to the end of his trouser legs, giving the impression he had nothing on under it.

As they threaded their way through the lanes and back streets, Jim held his father’s hand and skipped along beside him. Now that the gambling was off, he was looking forward to the football match. He loved the colour, excitement and drama of it, the frenzy of the great crowds. He had his football heroes and dreamed sometimes that he would be an Australian Rules footballer when he grew up; but lately he had decided it would be better to be a jockey if he wasn’t too heavy.

They turned into the street that runs at the back of the shabby Richmond Station, and Jim asked his father: “Are you going to have a few bets, Dad, and watch the results at the footie?”

“You bet I am. I’ll just slip down to the pub and leave them with jack Pittson. Racing is my game, not football. There is the race-train pulling in on its way to Caulfield now.”

“Gee, it must be good-oh at the races, Dad.”

“It’s good-oh, all right.”

“You can go to the races if you like, Dad.”

“What about you?”

“Oh, I don’t mind. I’ve been to the footie plenty of times, but I’ve never been to the races.”

Tom Roberts stopped and looked down at his son. He desperately wanted to go to Caulfield Racecourse, but he would have liked his deception of Cissie to end, and, deep in his heart he knew he should be shielding his son from gambling.

“I dunno, Jim. We’re supposed to be going to the football.”

He hesitated then grasped his son’s hand more tightly.

“Come on.”

I'll take yhat as another voice in the "chorus" of approval
Stay tuned, the races at Caulfield are "good oh" I hear.
You may have been there on this day

I need those Caulfield results.
Could be handy tomorrow.

If i recall this day at Caulfield got young Jim hooked on the punt.

I doubt anyone was there as wasn't it set in the 30s (& fictional)