Why didnt he follow my advice & go to pub & lay off? Could have still walked away with 50 quid especially if they were 2 favs.

Kye Kye Kye.
How do you lay off if the collect might be........ 100  or........ 5
plus, not like there's any room on his credit card 

Spoon, i've read the book & know the local bookie would have given him credit.

He would have had an idea about the payout from the price of winners. Even if he only made 20 or so he could have withheld this from the missus & used it as a bank for next Caulfield meeting.

just kiddin , you're way ahead of me Kye [;)]

spare a thought for the poor  little korean kid

THERE....IS....NO....SPOOOOON Joined: 14 May 09
Replies: 138 19 Aug 10 14:54   
Hi fellas, thanks for the welcome, technical gremlins here, good to be back.
LIH, I finally recanted my ridiculous   talking Humphrey statement and associated deleted thread conspiracy , waalaaaa, discharged!!.
Have recently welcomed a Korean “home-stay” student into the realm and amongst the explained “traditional visitors duties” cooking, cleaning, car-washing, painting, floor-polishing  (sanding first of course) and re-blocking, I have explained that (during quiet time ) it would be good “for the English” to contribute a story to the betfair forum. Pronounced with a silent “t”, the befair forum is a collective of unfortunates with limited exposure to books.
Responses to the effort, encouraging or otherwise, are encouraged, the story is long. If not being enjoyed by forumites, I can obviously find something more productive for her to do. (paper-round?)


hey DA, NO BASEMENT BUDDY!!

Please read then pot away rather than just potting [;)]

Or if reading is a problem, you could enrol here...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ffj8SHrbk0&feature=related

There was no anger in his voice, only despair.

Tom finally looked up at his wife who had seemed to age a dozen years in just the last couple of hours.
"well love, thats the end of that then. Blanky horse buck jumped at the start and tossed his rider."
"Oh Tom, does that mean we lost" asked Cissie who was not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
Yes love, we're fu ked, said Tom who rarely if ever swore.
"But Tom, what about the rent and money for food and shoes and with the new baby due ..." Quickly she silenced herself.
Tom spun around to her with wide incredulously questioning eyes.
"New baby! what new baby Cissie" he asked in a voice that seemed to come from deep within his chest.

There was no anger in his voice, only despair.

                                                                                  *
Now the writing comes easier. Make each chapter more or less self contained. Think it out well, then write it fast, all in one go, between lock up (4 o’clock) and lights out (8.30).

Then lie on your back in the dark not noticing the noises of the jail night. Thinking of Jim Roberts, thinking of how to fit him into a book.

To now, I have given the impression, that Jim was concerned only, or mainly, with gambling.

Why have I done so?

“You must stick to the point; you must tell only that which is relevant to the main theme,” Ihave kept telling myself.
I must continue to do that. But what about the full man alive that was Jim, the whole story of him? What kind of lad was he during the first year or two when he worked at the grocer’s store in High Street?

                                                                            9
In his fourteenth year, Jim Roberts was a shy, sensitive boy of imaginative and artistic temperament. The ample pages of learning and culture never opened to him, yet he was then, and remained, a person of alert intelligence.

Adapting himself to working eight hours a day instead of the six at school. Working with older people who seemed to have no interest in helping him to survive the terrors of adolescence. Beginning to shave once a week – he didn’t need to, but that was one way of asserting his manhood. Under the impact of his first job, he began to adopt that self-assertion which, in later life, became a feature of his personality. Because he was shy he needed to assert himself; and, when he did so, the adults with whom he worked put him back in his true place as a junior, at the beck and call of everyone, to speak only when spoken to. And when the adults rebuffed him, he asserted himself all the more.

His psychological problems were aggravated by manhood coming to him suddenly and a little late. Neither his father, his mother, nor anyone else had warned him what to expect. His father would not have thought of the problem. His mother probably did, but preferred her children to be innocent, not realizing that his innocence was a dangerous form of ignorance.

Consequently, the manhood thus growing mysteriously struck fear into Jim instead of joy. The erections, the weeping penis, the sensual dreams, were shameful things. But his manhood turned his attention to girls, to dreams of an ideal woman. This restlessness worried Jim and he had no one to whom to turn. Still a practising Roman Catholic, he thought of the confessional but could not face the humiliation of mentioning these delicate matters to the priest. Indeed, he went several months without going to confession until his mother scolded him and he attended to his duties. But he did not mention the upheaval of manhood within him.

He was a devoted son, bringing home his pay envelope unopened. His mother, though desperately hard pressed for money, invariably gave him back a shilling for pocket money and, once in a while, shouted him to a film show or football match.
As to clothes, he had one of everything. One cheap, ill-fitting suit of clothes, one pair of working trousers (at work he wore a white coat supplied by the firm), one shirt, one tie, one pair of socks, one pair of working books, one pair of shoes (dancing pump style, not because he danced but because they were cheapest). He had no hat, for a hat is something you can do without – many depression-bred lads have never worn a hat to this day.

Most evenings he went to the billiard-room in High Street. Afterwards he might stand with other lads on a street corner, talking about nothing in particular, sky-larking and calling or whistling after girls whom they would harass collectively because they feared them individually.

He had one particular mate, a lad named Harry Walton, the only child of a drunken father and a pathetic mother. Walton too, was a sensitive lad of some intelligence. He turned to Jim Roberts because Jim did not scorn his parents. Jim moved closer to him because he sensed a similar temperament. Also Walton was so incurably shy that Jim could lead him and so find compensation for his own inferior position elsewhere.

Furthermore, Harry was the only lad who looked up to Jim’s artistic ability. He was not smitten with that militant ignorance which is one of the worst effects of the demoralization which our society inflicts on the poor. Jim was secretly ambitious to succeed as an artist, and he’d begun to write the window tickets for the shop. He had quite a flair for it. Jack Pittson encouraged him – the price-tickets were thus written on the cheap. Also, Jim did a lot of drawing in his spare time; he had passed from copying to crude but original drawings, his subjects were animals, furniture and flowers.

One day he would be a great artist, he told his mother; he would make a lot of money and she would no longer need to scrimp and work her fingers to the bone. His mother cherished his talent and ambition and so did his father. Apart from them, Harry Walton was the only one to whom he could speak of it.

Jim Roberts and Harry Walton shared a few interests, holding them apart from the other billiard-room and street-corner lads. Sometimes on a Friday night Harry came to the Roberts’s home, which he saw as a haven of escape from his own unhappy house. Sometimes, he and Jim would listen to the wrestling on Tom Roberts’s old crystal set; more often it was the “Famous Tenors” session and other light classical music. Jim’s taste for this music had been cultivated by his parents. Cissie had the Irish love of a good song, and Tom had the soul of a frustrated musician.

Walton was even more poverty stricken than Jim. Before long, under the influence of Tom Roberts’s efforts of self-emancipation through coupons, they began to enter for various newspaper competitions. At first, they confined themselves to the word competitions and “Find the Ball”, but by the end of 1931, when Jim was approaching fourteen and Harry was a year older, they began to enter several racing coupons each week.

Each Thursday night, Jim and Harry would pore over the coupons at the living-room table.  Ah, the cultural barrenness of the life we thrust upon our youth. Imagine these two curly heads, one black, one sandy, bent over the coupons inserted in the press as a monument to the desperation of the people.

With grave efficiency, Jim filled in the coupons and Harry addressed the envelopes. Harry wrote awkwardly, the pen held at an incongruous angle against the stub of the fore-finger his father had accidentally cut off with a tomahawk.

They studied first the newspaper photograph for the “Find the Ball” contest: a photo of a scene in a football match from which the football had been deleted. The competitors strove to mark with a cross the exact spot where the ball had been in the original photograph. Jim and Harry debated where the ball should be, judging by the position and attitudes of the players, then marked as many coupons as they could borrow. Once Harry Walton saw a smudge on each picture and imagined that the ball had been incompletely etched out. They marked their crosses on or near the smudge – but the ball turned out to be in an opposite corner of the photograph.

No, they never did get near “finding the ball’. They got closer, however, with the Tall Story and Word competitions. One of the radio stations ran a competition for the best tall story sent in each week. Now, Tom Roberts was a good story teller and delighted in telling tall tales; he had been born and bred in the bush where these stories thrive. From this store of yarns, Jim and Harry drew each week for the radio competitions. Jim wrote them out in a neat hand and lucid style. Once they entered a story that went something like this: “There is no doubt that Sydney wharf-labourers are the strongest men in the world. Once a gang of them were unloading blacksmiths’ anvils. They carried the anvils down the gang plank, one under each arm, from the ship. The smallest and weakest of their number staggered and fell into the water between the wharf and the ship’s side. He came to the surface, treading water, and called out to the foreman: “Hey, get me out of this or I’ll drop one of these here bloody anvils’.”

Having lost competitions in the competitions, and having sixpence each, they repaired to the billiard-room, leaving Tom Roberts to listen to the session for them. They were in the middle of a snooker pool with some other youths, hoping thereby to turn their sixpences into a few shillings, when Jim’s brother Gerald burst into the billiard-room. Their story had been read, it was in the final judging! Jim and Harry put their cues in the rack and, with Gerald hot on their heels, ran headlong home. There they found Tom Roberts sharing the headphones with Cissie.

Tom Roberts raised his hand for silence as they burst into the room.

“The last story has been read,” he said. “Yours is in the final ten. The judges will give their decision in a minute. Here, Cissie, you give your earphone to Jim. Harry, you have this one.”

The two gamblers sat listening tensely. But soon they were crestfallen – their story was not selected as the winner. They would have to be content with a consolation prize of ten shillings. Still, as Jim said to Harry next day, ten shillings was not to be sneezed at – the most money either of them had had for their own use at one time.

In the very same week they had an even more exciting experience with the word puzzle competition. In this contest each letter in the alphabet was valued at a certain number of points. The competitors had to fill in a small crossword puzzle, and big cash prizes were offered for the highest and lowest scores. After several weeks of competing unsuccessfully for the highest score, Jim suggested that they concentrate on the lowest: the prizes were smaller but the competition less keen, he reasoned. They suited his words to action, and after studying the dictionary, worked out a set of words all made up of E’s, T’s, and N’s the only three for which the minimum score of one was listed.

They literally could not lose! And the first prize would be no less than five hundred pounds. Indeed, they began to spend the money. Jim told his mother he would buy her new furniture and clothes and buy himself a course in drawing.
On the last occasion I talked to him, Jim could still remember some of the words they used. Ten was one, tent was another, and yet another of which he was very proud, was entente.

They waited at a newsagent’s shop for the arrival of the afternoon paper which contained the competition results. At last it arrived. As the newsagent opened the parcel of papers, Jim said to Harry, expressing less confidence than he felt: “We’d better not get too built up. We’re not the only pebble on the beach. A lot will have it right.”

He spoke more truly than he believed; no less than two thousand people won the competition for the lowest score and received five shillings each.

They abandoned the word puzzles, tall stories and “Find the Ball” after those experiments, and decided to concentrate on a race-horse tipping contest in which the odds against them were less and the requirements of winning more clearly defined. They had one or two near-misses in these competitions, too, often selecting four winners in one coupon, and felt their judgement of form was improving.

Jim and Harry went to the Royal Oak Hotel each week, not to drink but to follow on the radio the fate of the horses listed in their coupons. More than once, when some of their horses had won, Jim or Harry remarked that, if they had only had money to gamble, they would surely have won.

When Jim received the seven and sixpence in competition prizes, he offered five shillings to his mother. Cissie could have done with the money for a dozen purposes but, generous always, and sorrowful that she could not offer her eldest son greater opportunities, she refused to accept it. On the following Saturday, Jim Roberts sauntered forth to the Royal Oak Hotel, ****ing coins in the right-hand trouser pocket of his blue suit. He had combed the curls out of his black hair with a comb dipped in soapy water and had polished his dancing pumps. He walked with a jaunty air – he had money and he was going to bet with it.

Harry Walton was waiting for him by appointment: they had decided to give their fifteen shillings a fling on the horses selected in their coupons.

Now, instead of being a messenger and listening to the radio for the fate of his father’s choices, Jim could lay his own bets, support his own horses.

Between races, Jim and Harry Walton sat in the billiard-room studying the form guides, discussing prospects. Just prior to each race they made their bets with Jack Pittson; he was too nervous to express the surprise he felt – too nervous and too avid for their money. They did not understand the technical details of distances, weights, class of race, betting habits of trainers, horses for courses and all the other paraphernalia of the racing game. They bet modestly, sixpence each way or a shilling straight out, and received a ticket from Pittson. What is known as beginner’s luck or mug’s luck, was with them for they each backed three winners and won more than two pounds.

How easy it is! Jim thought that night as he counted his money in the lavatory. He could win every week and always have money. But it wasn’t the money, really. Money had little to do with it; what mattered was the growing need to satisfy a craving…..

I forgot to mention the last time I was there Exacta said that due to climate change and his newly shorn scrotum he felt it was time he made amends with Village Kid and was going to hitch hike up to Redcliffe,that's where he thinks VK lives,in order to move in with him.I asked him if he'd told VK about it but he waved me away saying that any objection VK had would soon dissipate when VK joined him on his hallucinogenic drug party.Good luck mate!

ridicule. Jim was a valued client outside working hours, but Pittson exerted authority over him at work. 

So Jim hastened to make up those items in Mrs. Feathers’s order from the backstore – potatoes, bran and pollard for the fowls – while Pittson put together  the items from the shop – butter, bacon and the rest.

Then Pittson said: “Collect the money and get back.”

Soon Jim was on his way to Dr. Feathers’s residence, the order and docket in the box on the handlebars of the bike. He had had a busy morning and was tired and hungry. He rode into a headwind up the High Street hill, his bike wobbling precariously close to passing cars and trams.

At last he reached the doctor’s residence and entered the tradesman’s entrance at the side. Mrs. Feathers, a handsome, sensual woman, came out and held the wide door of the kitchen open for him.

“Good morning, grocer,” she said, speaking in a less condescending tone than that which she usually reserved for the  “trades people”, for she had a fancy for this jaunty, curly-haired lad. Indeed everyone liked Jim with his handsome bearing, his big blue eyes which looked warmly from between their long lashes. His mother said those eyes should have been Meg’s………

“Good morning,” mimicked the cockatoo which was preening itself on its stand in the yard.

“Good morning, Mrs. Feathers,” Jim replied brightly, and they both laughed pleasantly while he checked the groceries on to the table.

Mrs. Feathers took a purse from the mantelpiece and handed him a five pound note.

“I haven’t change, Mrs. Feathers.”

She rummaged in the purse and found a pound note and sufficient silver to pay the bill – twenty-eight shillings and sixpence.

He took the money and receipted the docket.

“And how are you getting on with your drawing, Jim?” she asked.

“Ah, not bad, Mrs. Feathers. I’d like to do a course later …… I’m practising drawing animals and birds lately. Could I come up tomorrow and draw the cocky?”

She gushed her agreement and soon he departed. Outside he tossed the box neatly on the handlebars, cocked his leg over the saddle then muttered: “Hell, a flat tyre.”

He took the mending kit from behind the saddle of the bike, and began to remove the rear wheel. As he mended the puncture he asked himself: “Wonder what time it is? I must get back to the shop with the money before they close.”

At last, the tube was mended, the tyre pumped up and the wheel refitted, and Jim rode as fast as his tired legs would drive the bikes. But when he arrived at the shop the shutters were up and the place was deserted.

As he rode towards home, he passed the Royal Oak Hotel and there saw the gamblers gathered on the corner of the street and near the billiard-room windows. What a pity he had no money to bet with; the horses chosen in his coupon would win today, he thought. An attractive, yet frightening thought came into his mind: he could bet with Mrs. Feathers money. He would be sure to win and could pay in the money on Monday. The very idea shocked him at first; he resisted it as he ate his lunch.
Lunch finished, he changed into his blue suit, put Mrs. Feathers’ money in his trouser pocket. He oiled his hair and combed the curls flat, only to suffer his usual frustration as they quickly sprouted anew.

He’d just go to the billiard-room and have a yarn. His mother was somewhere in the front of the house. Feeling unaccountably guilty, he tip-toed rounds the side of the house and, on reaching the street, ran towards the hotel. After running a hundred yards, he took control of himself and slowed to a walk.

I cannot do it! I mustn’t do it. It wouldn’t be right! He turned and walked back to the house, left the money on the window ledge near his bed and retraced his steps.

He found Harry Walton in the billiard-room and this inevitably led to racing talk. Harry was downcast. He had only a shilling to bet with. This was his usual situation; he bet every penny he earned and constantly moaned his ill-luck.

“A pity a man hasn’t got any money,”  he told Jim. “The races look easy – couldn’y fail to back winners.”

These were Jim’s views, too; before the first race every punter is convinced he will win, all the more deeply if he has no money.

“That first favourite couldn’t lose,” Walton continued. “Be about six to four. If a man was holding money he could get a bank for the day on it.”

Jim himself rarely backed a short-priced horse. A policy of looking for something to beat the favourite had grown out of his limited finances. But the favourite in the first race, the maiden Two Year Old, looked a good thing.

Without being aware of making any decision, he found himself walking briskly towards home. When he stepped on to the back verandah his mother was in the kitchen cooking her Saturday afternoon scones.

“So you’re back, Jim,” she said. “I didn’t hear you go.”

“I forgot me money, Mum,” he replied huskily. “Want to have a game of billiards.”

“Hope you’re not gambling, Jim,” she said with a slight tone of accusation.

“Not today, Mum. I can’t afford it,” he evaded.

He went back to the back bedroom. He took only the pound note, leaving the silver on the ledge. He noticed that his hands were hot and clammy. As he passed through the living-room, he saw his father seated by the radio in a gloomy corner….

“What’s all the good things, Dad?” he asked softly.

“Ah, they look hard, Jim,” Tom Roberts replied, then added in whisper: “Hey, Jim, here’s a bob; put it on Carpentier for me.”

“Righto,” Jim replied, taking the coin his father proffered, tacitly aware that his mother was not to be told.

A feverish feeling swept over Jim as he neared the hotel. He would put a pound, the biggest single bet he had ever made, on the favourite in the first, then bet with the profits. Here was the gambler’s mania in the deepest form, the desperate plunge with other people’s money….

Mrs. Feathers was forgotten, his drawing ambitions were forgotten, only the prospect of the ecstatic hours, the plunge into the welcome darkness….

Back at the hotel, a disturbing thought occurred to him. He had to bet with Pittson, and Pittson knew he had Mrs. Feathers’ money!  He could not risk it. The race was due in ten minutes; there was no time to find another bookie. Now, in his disappointment, the favourite seemed even more certain to win. There must be some way. Harry Walton!  Harry would make the bet and ask no questions.

Walton was sitting on the billiard-room window sill.

“Here, listen, Harry,” Jim said softly. “Put this quid on the favourite. A bloke on me round gave it to me to put on. And listen, don’t say anything to “fousand” – just put it on in your own name.”

Harry Walton took the note, hesitated a moment as if on the verge of comment, shrugged and walked towards the hotel yard.
Harry returned and handed Jim the ticket. “I had my last shilling on it meself,” he said. Together they went to the passage behind the bar and joined a throng of punters around the Mickey Mouse radio supplied for the convenience of the gamblers. Its asthmatic speaker distorted the voice, but someone in front said “They’re off.”

Jim Roberts pressed closer, craning his neck, his senses alert, his heart pounding. It would win; it must win!
“The favourite got away bad, it’s lying last,” someone said. Jim’s eardrums expanded to distinguish the raucous words of the radio commentator.

God it was right, the favourite was last in a strung-out field, in a six furlong race at Moonee Valley! Couldn’t win from there! What would he do? He found himself praying, but how could God and the Virgin Mary help in this?

The field was turning for home. The announcer called the horses’ names at machine-gun speed. Keith Voitre had pulled the favourite to the outside. He was mowing the field down; but still a long way back and wide out on the track. Jim followed the announcer’s words, trying to visualize the scene ten miles away in the short straight of the Moonee Valley racecourse. All the time he made frantic gestures with his arms, like a jockey urging a horse.

frantic gestures with his arms, like a jockey urging a horse.

The favourite failed by a neck to catch the leader. “That favourite was the best thing beaten I’ve seen in years,” the announcer asserted.

Harry Walton grumbled and cursed: “If it was raining mansions I’d get hit on the head with a lavatory,” he concluded, revealing his rather unexpected talent for slang metaphor.

Jim, already learning to obscure his true feelings behind gambler’s fatalism, shrugged and replied: “There’s no good things in racing.” He had heard one of the older gamblers say that one day in the billiard-room….

The sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, the desperate dread tat rose in him, was part of the repulsive fascination of gambling. Somehow he must get the quid back, and there was only one way – bet with the eight and six that remained. He found himself walking home. His mother would be wondering why he had come back again. He could think of no excuse. He entered stealthily. His mother didn’t seem to be around – gone next door to see Mrs. Wilson perhaps. His brother, Gerald, was in the living-room with the earphones.

“Are you going to have a bet, Jim?” he asked.

“Might; haven’t got much dough.”

“I’ve got none,” Gerald said. “I sent in two coupons, though,” Gerald was a gambler too, but of a level-headed kind, unlikely to get into trouble.

Jim went to the bedroom, got the eight and six and left the house. After another desperate hour the money had found its way into Jack Pittson’s pocket.

That night, afraid to be alone, Jim went to the billiard-room and pushed his terrible feeling of guilt into the deepest recesses of his mind. After the billiard-room shut, he stood with other youths on the street corner, talking and skylarking. The others did so to hide boredom, Jim to suppress and evade his nagging fever of fear.

A sensation of dread followed him to bed and, when at last he slept, he dreamed that Jack Pittson and Mrs. Feathers were pursuing him down a long dark street. He fled from them on a bicycle, but its front wheel fell off and he crashed to the road. His puruers came closer now, they were not Pittson and Mrs. Feathers but two local policemen with guns in their hands.
He awoke sweating, writhing in his bed and crying out. His mother came to the door and asked” “Is that you calling out, Jim?”
“Yes, Mum, I must have been dreaming.”

She tucked him in as if he were still a child and, in a rare moment of affection, kissed his forehead. He clung to her for a moment before she departed.

He tried to push the terror of his dream from his mind, but he could not. The first faint glimmer of dawn peeped before he fell again to troubled sleep.



                                          PART    TWO

                                      A TICKET IS BOUGHT

The spirit has, for good or ill, permeated our national sentiment.

The gambling mania is a perversion of the daring and spontaneity of the Australian people.

But why do Australians prefer to gamble on horse racing? More people per year pass through the turnstiles of racecourses than any other sporting fixtures, not excluding cricket and football. The vast majority of adult Australians bet on horses at some time or another, a large minority bet on horses as a regular, ingrained habit. An average of over a hundred thousand people attend race meetings every week, all the year round. Next in popularity to galloping horses come trotting horses. There is a little gambling on dogs, an insignificant amount on boxing, cycle racing and football. Indoor gambling games enjoy little vogue in Australia – except poker machines. Poker or solo schools in private homes are not as common as supposed and small stakes usually apply. Housey-housey schools for charity and church funds are a sordid feature but are attended only by a small group of fervent gamblers, mainly women folk. One or two baccarat schools in each city are attended by wealthy people with more money than sense, and by professional gamblers. Of course, we Australians have more than our share of lotteries and raffles – and then there is two-up.
                                                                 

                                                       
                                                         11


Dreadful were the minutes, hours and days that dragged Jim Roberts to the next Saturday morning. That day, Mrs. Feathers rang her order through earlier than usual. When Pittson told him, Jim’s heart missed a beat. All morning he had dreaded that Mrs. Feathers would mention that she had paid her bill the week before – and he had told Pittson that she hadn’t because he had no change. Jim Roberts was not, and never became, a thief in the true sense of the word; he had not calculated to take the money; he had not stolen for profit nor out of greed but as a drug addict would steal to buy opium or heroin.

On the previous Sunday, the day after he lost the twenty-eight shillings and sixpence, he had risen late and  gone to second Mass. IN the incense-laden peace of the church, he brought himself to pray that some miracle might deliver him from retribution, but he felt that God and the Virgin Mary could not possibly help him after what he had done.

Walking home from the church, his tortured mind had turned to his arrangement to draw Mrs. Feathers’ cockatoo. At home, he sorted out his drawing materials, the home-made drawing board, the art-gum eraser, a bottle of fixative, some pencils of varying strength. Like a person suffering from dual-personality, he began to rationalize. He began to pretend he had not stolen the money. He sharpened his pencils with loving care, as if his mind were free and serene. He planned his work gravely and casually: he would do some pencil sketches of the cockatoo and later make pen drawings from them. He carefully fixed a large sheet of paper over the board with drawing pins. He was not a gambler in trouble but an artist on a drawing expedition; he would obtain valuable practice; he would impress Mrs. Feathers – and what handsome lad in his eighteenth year doesn’t like to impress an attractive woman in her late thirties? But as he neared the doctor’s surgery residence, the pretence collapsed and he was a guilty frightened boy.

What if Mrs. Feathers suspected him? There’s no reason why she should really; hadn’t he paid the money in every Saturday for nearly a year without mishap? Yet she might guess and ring the shop before next Saturday. He had until then to replace the money, he told himself. He earned only thirty shillings a week and he had to give his mother a pound of that………. But at least he had a week, a week to live! If Mrs. Feathers didn’t suspect.

He spent an uncomfortable hour and a half sitting on a box on the back lawn drawing the cockatoo which stood on its stand squawking, bristling it’s comb, scratching its nose and telling him to shut the gate.

“Hullo Cocky!”

Mrs. Feathers and the doctor were pleasant to him, interested in this grocer’s boy who might become a famous artist. At times he forgot the theft and played the part expected of him; at other moments he felt that the Feathers were watching him, somehow reading in his manner the truth about the money. His drawing, still untrained and uncertain, fell below its own level so that his sketches lacked sweep and imagination.

The week was a hell of sleepless nights and haunted days. He thought desperately of where he could borrow the money – twenty-eight and six now seems a trivial sum, but then it was nearly a week’s wages at a time when a lot of people didn’t get wages. He could think of no one he knew to whom he could go, except his mother, and he daren’t ask her.

He had found a ray of desperate hope in a casual remark made by Harry Walton at the billiard-room.
“They tell me old Peter Lynch has got all sorts of dough stored away in his room,” Harry had said, referring to the old pensioner gambler who had sometimes played poker with Tom Roberts.

The next evening, Jim Roberts found himself walking in the direction of Peter Lynch’s old hut, behind an empty shop in High Street. He kept repeating to himself: “I’ve got to ask him for a lend of thirty bob. It’s my only hope.”
Feeling his way down the side of the shop, the resolve he had spent all day building up began to desert him. Old Peter won’t lend me any money – and he’ll tell Dad I asked him.

He found Peter Lynch, wizened and white-haired, lying in an untidy-none-too-clean bed, reading a racing newspaper by the light of a candle. Lynch still had his shirt on, apparently being in the habit of sleeping in his day clothes. As Jim pushed the door open the old man raised himself on one elbow and peered with rheumy eyes.

Joined the forum yesterday and eagerly awaiting the next installment

Got to keep the young Korean employed.  I assume she is being paid for her efforts

Anyong haseyo Mr Archie, welcome to the forum.

Archie's here, Debbie's here, Veronica too, Reggie's here .....hey Jughead, where are youuuuuuuuuuuuu?


“Thank God, I’ve got that much money,” Cissie Roberts murmured.

                                                                       *
Confidence that I can finish this book has grown strong, and with it a fear that something might happen to the manuscript. Each day I have carried it around secreted under my jacket. What of an unfriendly warder confiscates it.

Then I thought of the Bush Lawyer! Make several copies of the pages already written, then have the copies smuggled out to a safe place.

Ten evenings copying the manuscript. Laborious and unsatisfying, but I must guard the work I have done. Now there are three copies of everything I have written.

And tomorrow the Bush Lawyer will act, god bless him! Tomorrow he will have one copy smuggled out of the jail. Another will be hidden inside, the third I will carry with me always.

In future the pages written one night will be copied twice the following night. Then, as frequently as circumstances permit, one copy will be disposed of inside the jail, another outside….

But what if they raided my cell tonight? Just when all is arranged….

This fear will combine with the heat to keep me wakeful this night. Not Julia, but the heat, the book and the fear…….



                                                              12


On the Monday, Jim paid in the money and, on his way home from work, handed Mrs. Feathers a receipt. A profound feeling of relief and serenity came to him. He felt normal again, clean and wholesome; he could mix with people without feeling that his inner dead created a barrier. He began to relish even the plainest meal and to see new colour and pleasantness in his surroundings.

He would never bet again, he had resolved. He had agreed to repay his mother at two shillings a week. How good she had been – hadn’t told Dad or any of the family, apparently.  Gave him a good talking to, but didn’t press him too hard, placing him on his sense of honour to reform and not hurt her again.

Going his rounds during the following Saturday morning, Jim found himself whistling one or other of the sentimental melodies he had learned from the radio. Soon his whistling fell to repeating over and over again the one tune, as whistling will when it is aimed only at expressing inner good spirits. Instead of the sentimental love songs he usually whistled, he now whistled, and hummed, and sang “Mother Machree”.

I love the dear silver that shines in your hair

And the brow that’s all furrowed and wrinkled with care.

I love the dear fingers so tailorworn for me,

Ah, God Bless you and keep you, Mother Machree.

Late in the morning, he rode past the hotel. Already the gamblers were gathering, studying their form guides, talking excitedly, plunging into the elation and the remorse that would face most of them before the afternoon was out.
Jim pitied them. He had broken the spell. Like a recruit to Alcoholics Anonymous, he felt clean, and superior in his cleanliness.

With his mind and spirit freed from the avid study of racehorse form, he turned to his drawing with great vigour and singlemindedness. One can succeed in a creative enterprise only if undivided intense concentration is devoted to it. So it proved with Jim. He found new reservoirs of talent, he began to handle his material with more confidence, to study the books from the library with greater  interest; he began to look forward to drawing with some of the expectancy he had in the past reserved for gambling.  The lettering in his window tickets became smoother and more symmetrical, his pencil drawings bolder and sharper in tonal contrast, his caricatures more original in style and more apt in exaggeration – and he began to draw cartoons that had some point, even though it was blunted by his lack of knowledge of life and society.

2 days since the last installment?? Is Therisa on holidays?  I need my fix.

'They were loading shame and humiliation onto' - SPOON!

Hey Log, are you a plumber?

And as for you fruitcake, try a spoonful of sugar, apparently it makes the medicine go down [;)]

actually with your pharmaceutical intake, make it a ladleful  



on to the cart as part and parcel of their belongings.


Embarrassed, Gaynor called Jim aside and stated that he had already delivered the drawings to the photographic shop of which he gave Jim the address. As they parted at the gate Jim said: “Is there anything I can do to help?”

“No, Jim….Ah, yes, there is one thing.”

“And what’s that, Mr. Gaynor?”

“Give up gambling.”

“Oh, I have, Mr. Gaynor. I’ll never bet again.”

Gaynor placed his left hand on Jim’s shoulder and, with the other clasped his right hand. He looked into Jim’s eyes searchingly.

“Jim. Remember when you, shall we say, took a loan of Mrs. Feathers’ money?”

Jim blanched but did not speak.

Gaynor continued: “Well, Pittson became suspicious. More recently he became suspicious of me. He is wise in the ways of gamblers. On that occasion he instructed me to ring Mrs. Feathers to check if she had paid you. I did so but told neither Pittson nor Mrs. Feathers what had happened. I knew you would replace the money. You see, Jim, some men can gamble with impunity, but not men like you and me.”

Jim tried to speak but could find no words.

“Put all that behind you, Jim boy,” Gaynor advised him. “You have the talent to go a long way in life. If you won’t learn from your own experience, learn from mine.”

Walking home, Jim’s embarrassment passed, leaving behind it gratitude to Gaynor. Don’t worry, Mr. Gaynor, I’ve beaten the habit. My life is full and exciting, I don’t need to waste my time and money gambling.

When the photographs were ready, Jim was faced with the problem of paying for them. Vurly Condon had the solution; he collected the money in advance, a guinea from the Club and two and sixpence from the members portrayed.

Jim made a profit of two guineas. Now he could plan to make his dreams come true. He could not develop his art work much further without training. Well, all right, he would start saving up for a course.


                                                                                   

                                          *


I looked for the Bush Lawyer on a Sunday afternoon. A suspicious “C” Division crim conducted me to an obscure corner of the yard. The Bush Lawyer was sitting on a box, a tin full of money and tobacco between his feet.

A cluster of men in ill-fitting jail clothes, green hats at varied angles, shapeless grey coats…. Anguish forgotten in the eager gambling…

“I need a quid or a quid’s worth of weed to see him go,” the Bush Lawyer calling, his voice muted.

A prisoner known as “Over-the-wall” because he was twice escaped,  was standing in the centre of the circle; a small wooden kip in his hand.

“Come in, Spinner!”

Seeing a two-up school for the first time.

My jail coat bulged with copies of the manuscript parcelled in newspaper. Distrustful eyes glanced sidelong at me.

Someone saying softly to the Bush Lawyer: “Look who’s here, the square head from the library.”

The Bush Lawyer glancing, the impish eyes shrewd, the hat rakish: “He’s O.K. Paul’s no square.”

The Bush Lawyer calling me aside, speaking aloud for the benefit of eavesdroppers: “How are yer, Paul. Want to sell some tobacco? O.K. See me later. Running a bit of a game.’ Then, raising his voice again: “O.K., son? Right?”

Tapping the manuscript through my coat and lowering his voice again: “Thought for a minute you’d got in with the cats and got in the pudding’ club. Must get back to the game. Some of these bastards have more front than Myers; might get their hand caught in the tin.”
The voices called again, the pennies glinted in the sun….

Leaving them I repeated to myself: “Behind the Mill at four o’clock.”



                                         13   


Tom Roberts saw the advertisement first. “Learn to be an artist in your own home… Cartooning, Illustrating……Send for the beautiful illustrated booklet…. Free! Without obligation…..”
“Might be worth writing in, Jim,” he said. “Seems a reasonable offer.”

Jim did so and received back a colourful brochure containing sketches to be copied as a test of his potential abilities. Jim worked late copying the drawings. He told me in the remand yard that one drawing pictured an artist working at a drawing-board; another a very large rooster looking disdainfully at a very small chicken. He was tempted to trace the outlines to make sure he was accepted as a student, but decided not to. He must succeed on his merits. He need not have worried, for the company concerned would have accepted a blind man as a student – provided he had the money.

Jim despatched the drawings and focused his whole being on bringing the mailman with an early reply. A few days later he returned from work to find a letter waiting. He opened it with trembling hands and read it aloud to his mother who had resisted all morning the temptation to open it. Because of the outstanding ability displayed in Jim’s samples, he had been granted a scholarship entitling him to a two-year course of training worth one hundred and fifty pounds for only seventy five pounds. Now, that was something!

dilligence can allow us to accomplish a goal once in a while , but consistant achievement happens only when we love what we do

dont leave me hangin.........get those little stumpy fingers tapping