We holidayed every summer in Frankston.
We called it Port Phillip Riviera but others weren’t as polite. They were great summers and, like all kids, my brother and I would recreate our favourite sporting contests in the back yard.
We’d paint three stumps on the tin rubbish bin, tape some gaffer around a old tennis ball and presto it was Australia v England.
Other times we’d run the hose for an hour to get the ground muddy and it was Melbourne v Collingwood.
A couple of shrubs were the goals up one end and a couple of beach umbrellas were the goals at the other end and whoever lost the toss suffered the ignominy of being Collingwood for the afternoon.
My brother and I also loved racing, so we did what two kids on holiday had to do to, we had our own Cup Carnival.
Now, obviously, horses weren’t an option so we raced the next best thing. Mice. White mice to be precise.
The infrastructure was already there. The ping pong table was a natural racetrack, flat and sweeping, and was quickly fashioned into the Flemington of the Peninsula.
Both of our parents smoked a pack of Peter Stuyvesant a day so there were cartons of fags all over the house. The packets of Stuyvos laid end on end formed the running rail. Inside and out. I don’t mean to gloat but we had moveable rails 30 years before the industry ever cottoned on and there was absolutely no bias.
I insisted that for this to work the local kids could bet with confidence on a very fair racing surface. The cigarette cartons themselves were fashioned into starting stalls and a school ruler was the starting mechanism. There was never any need for a flag start and I doubt the mice would’ve responded anyway.
This was no half arsed operation, this was a highly sophisticated and professionally run industry.
One lap of the track was a sprint race and the staying race were run over two. Once every couple of weeks we’d rearrange the packets of Stuyvos down each side of the table and run a sprint race ‘down the straight’ but we soon gave that away as there was always a stack of interference, I just don’t think the mice ever really handled going down the straight.
My old man also smoked cigars, those ones where each cigar came in an individual thin tin cylinder. I thought to myself, “hello, these cylinders would make perfect hurdles”, but it just didn’t work, white mice can’t jump.
It was all handicap racing and I employed a traditional handicap system. When a mouse won a race, we handicapped it by sticky taping a 10 cent piece to its back. If it won again, we’d sticky tape a 20 piece to its back. Three in a row and it copped the heavy impost of the dodecagonal 50 cent piece.
There was little point in introducing Weight For Age racing as white mice rarely reach the age of three.
The mouse racing was a huge success. Pretty soon every kid in Goold St Frankston had a racing mouse and every Saturday we would have an eight race card with full fields.
Everything headed towards the last Tuesday in January when we would hold the time honoured Frankston Cup.
An open handicap for white mice over three laps of the testing Ping Pong table. I don’t mean to brag but my brother and I won this race three years in a row. Luck didn’t come into it. It was in the training and in the feed.
My mice were always the fittest mice in the race. You only had to see them parade to know this to be true. I employed the tried and tested Bart Cummings philosophy whereby all of my staying mice had at least 100 meters in their legs come Cup Day.
This plus a specially weighted resistance wheel in their cage meant they were rock hard fit and well muscled come ‘The last Tuesday’. And their feed. I would never say that they had ‘assistance’ but extra doses of sunflower oil in the feed did wonders. They definitely found a length or two.
Don’t believe me? Look it up. My mice dominated the Cup year after year.
But things were turned on their head one year. An English family had moved in up the road and the kids had brought with them their own English racing mice. These pasty faced, slack jawed kids from up the road won every staying race for the next three years, our local mice still dominated the sprint racing but we couldn’t go a yard against their stayers.
And gee they were good types, and why wouldn’t they be?
The English mice had the benefit of hundreds of years of breeding and looked it. They were magnificent specimens.
Long necks, beautiful heads with strong and vibrant whiskers and these wonderful long, beautifully balanced tails. I often wondered, even at my young age, how hundreds of years of breeding had left these magnificent rodent specimens, yet the same hundreds of years of breeding had done nothing for the English human population.
Following this passage of English domination I decided enough was enough and I brought my own mice out from the UK, and with my special training methods and feed I was confident that I could bring the Cup home.
All was in readiness. I’d run my best two mice dead in all their lead up races by dramatically overfeeding them with an entire block of Kraft Cheddar prior to them racing. All was set.
The entire Cup field was stabled at my place for integrity reasons. I trusted no one. I woke up as excited as a kid could be on Cup morning knowing the Cup was in my grasp. But imagine my horror walking into a scene of carnage and horror. The next door neighbour’s cat had got into the shed where the mice were stabled and had eaten the entire Cup field and the two emergencies.
I was devastated, the connections of the other mice were shattered. The cat not so much. It was a scene of utter desolation, there was no alternative other than to abandon the meeting. That was the year they didn’t run the Cup.
